Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Beta issues

OK, so this game is really not making me happy. I went through town and did everything I could find/figure out, and ended up just a bit more than halfway through level 3. I picked up the two companions, learned some spells, put out the fire on the ship, got a line on where the staff went, sorted through most of the murder mystery (now I have to find the beach), picked up a number of legion quests, joined the fabulous five, dealt with the vengeance-crazed elf, and looted pretty much everything I could manage. At this point, every quest in my log is pointing outside of town. I also explored the "end of time" and the hall of heroes when that unlocked.

Leaving town, I have found 4 fights I could choose amongst- a single orc on the beach, which I dispatched, then dug up some orc graves for armor, a set of 3 zombies just outside the northwest gate, a huge cadre of zombies in the northern part of the graveyard, and a pretty substantial set of boars, archers and a mage. Oh, and a big set of orcs outside a cave just beyond the single grieving orc.

With my current equipment, spells, and abilities, basically all of these fights are death, aside from the 3 zombies just outside the northwest gate.

Issues:
1. My damage and hit-chances with melee are absolutely crap. Even with giving a 38-72 damage 1-handed club to the warrior companion, I'm seeing her hit chances at 60%, and when she connects, I'm typically seeing 45-ish damage, with 30 absorbed. Also, the "hit chance" displayed appears to be severely bogus. If my hit chance is 50%, I will generally hit with one in four attacks. My assassin is far worse, he's sitting at 48% chance to hit with 3 attacks per round, and I've seen him go 3 rounds without hitting once- so 9 missed attacks in a row. When he connects (with a dagger rated @ 17-28 damage, the best I could purchase), I see him generally hit for 6-9 damage, with 3-5 being absorbed.

2. Combat targeting is stupidly fiddly. I have missed spells and special skills with cooldowns because the enemies are sitting there animating a bob and weave, and found that just when I clicked, they bobbed out of the way. So, not only do I face the RNG's decisions about hit/miss, I've got to be extra careful trying to get my targets right, lest I mis-click and move instead of attacking. God forbid that the accidental movement triggers attacks of opportunity from the baddies, or takes me through more elemental effect ground, or ends up making a spell hit my melee characters. I can start out with bows, but they do piss-all for damage and again, my hit frequency is extremely low.

3. I suspect I chose poorly when I created my characters- enchanter and assassin seem to be vastly underpowered. I have no fire magic (I could've spent a point to add it, but I haven't located any source of fire spells), and the CC effects available to me are pretty poor- I can knock down (if I get the roll) one character with the warrior, but they're up the next round, and deep freeze from the two mages will take one enemy out for ~4 rounds, but the lightning spell never seems to land a stun, poison from the assassin (which usually misses) does not affect the zombies, and that's all the CC I have. Oh, and I can't seem to land the bleed from the assassin either. Finding out that my characters are very very poor in combat is extremely disheartening after spending 3+ hours poking through everything in town. I also don't understand why every single fight outside town is facing enemies level 5 or more, when there's not enough XP in town to get to similar levels.

4. Also on the obnoxious side is that clicking on a character who died in the poison from the zombies intending to rez the character gathers the entire party around them, at which point they immediately start taking continuous damage from the poison (FAR faster than during combat), and all fall over dead before I can convince them to move away. I've also lost my melee characters due to the fact that as soon as combat ends, they start taking terrain damage at an incredibly fast clip, so they fall over dead from the terrain before I can move them out.

In short, combat in the game so far is a mass of frustration. I like the level of interaction with terrain/elements, and the exploration aspect is cool- finding the way into the secret room in esmerelda's basement was cool, but the combat is completely obnoxious- way too many enemies for me to handle in early fights when I simply don't have enough character-building to have tools to deal with it. I'll also note that having a mixture of AoE/ranged AND melee coming at me from the enemies when the enemy melee hits for far more than I do and my healing and crowd control abilities are distinctly limited is incredibly frustrating.