I'd like to chime in a bit as someone who is more of an average gamer. I find the normal difficulty to be rather punishing in the current state. I have managed to craftily get my way through a few of the tougher fights at earlier levels (I'm looking at your Mr. archers on the ridge). But I've also managed to just flail around and get crushed in fights that I'm even leveled with the enemy.
I think the big issue right now is AOE (poison and fire) and status effects. I've gone through numerous battles where my characters are taking 1/2 if not more damage of their HP in the first round largely due to poison. Couple this with enemy mages who seem to freeze/stun me rather frequently and it does make for frustrating battles. We get to top this all off with zombie enemies that not only do poison damage, but when struck, splash a little AOE poison about and are healed by that very poison.
I'm all for making fights challenging and rewarding. But I feel right now the game is forcing me to play a very CC heavy style to deal with all the enemies flinging CC about. This in turn I believe favors the caster classes since they have built in CC on a variety of their spell types. A caster can cast those virtually every turn while the melee dependent classes are reliant on skills (which have a cooldown) to do this. I'm also finding archers are very powerful with their caster like arrows.
The simplest way I've found to deal with this is just summon monsters to hopefully soak up all that CC and AOE nonsense. I feel this is poor game design. My party shouldn't be a world destroying superforce, but they also should just kneel down and die the minute they see a skeleton archer flinging poison arrows.
I'd like to close with my overall concern. If the game proves fairly difficult at the "normal" difficulty (meaning multiple reloads to deal with singular battles) for average players they will be turned off from the game. Most people will see normal difficulty and say "hey, that's me, I'm a normal guy," and start plowing through the game. They'll want to run out and destroy some skeletons only to be utterly trashed by these insane skeleton archers. If the game is to sell well and attract a large audience, it absolutely needs to cater to the folks that would shun this kind of difficulty (and let's face it, losing 1/2 or more of your HP in round one on your tank is extremely frustrating).
