For example, the western area can be completed and cleared by only two main characters, at level 2 or 3, without companions and without Lonewolf or Raistlin talents. Without any sort of min maxing or detailed studying of stats and skills.
Just doing what seems reasonable.
When someone makes a broad, general statement like this, I have to ask: Did you actually try that with all 11 of the starting classes, in various combinations? Because that does makes a difference.
It's a serious question, and I'm interested in the answer. What class combinations did you play with?
And when we come down to it, the normal difficulty mode and he western area is supposed to be easier.
We are supposed to kill the Ghoul at the Lighthouse in a more or less easy way.
Thats what it is there for.
Yes, exactly.
Any additional changes of this kind, aiming to make the game harder or more challenging - should be left specifically for the Harder difficulty.
Because, I dont mean doing things in ways that would only falsely raise the difficulty, by just lowering our damage and increasing the enemy damage or health points. Which is what most, 99% of Hard difficulty modes comedown to.
This other kind of deeper, better redesign of difficulty, Ai, statistics, skills, enemy positions and group compositions of combat encounters is a much more demanding task and it would take some time to do.
Which is why i would actually suggest to delay any actual Hard difficulty redesign for a free dlc, or an expansion or some future update.
Or even a mod.
Because that kind of a thing needs to be done properly.
Just changing damage and HP of enemies or our characters serves no purpose. Its just a cheap inconsequential trick.
Its saying: yeah we have the hard difficulty but, it doesnt do anything really. It wouldn't serve or be of use to anyone.
I'll agree with this as well. I do like difficulty changes which are more than just "more enemy health and more damage received".
Dragon Commander is a good example: on Hard, the first campaign map adds a bunch of Hunter units to the strategy map, which make it harder to take the country to the west. Hard-mode AI is also smarter and uses skills better than normal mode AI.
I agree that kind of thing probably can't be done perfectly in the month left.
However there are signs the AI is getting better. It already takes into account which of its available skills would be effective and which would not be when deciding what to do.
I witnessed this personally. I learned that the archer "Mysterious Opponent" in the burial mound used to open her turn with an explosive arrow. So I pre-empted this by casting Rain first. She didn't use the explosive arrow, instead she disabled both my characters with freezing arrows.
