*sighs* the difficulty slider is not even working yet, you do know this right?
Also you mentioned play through..so you know pretty much where to go and what to get. New players who will be buying and playing the game for the first time will not know this..If Larian made the game for just a small handful of people..their sales would be horrible O.O
Wait until the difficulty slider is working~
Didn't know we were getting difficulty sliders, I loves sliders!
As for the play-through thing, imo two things going on "difficulty of understanding the games features" and "combat difficulty".
The first is a new player unfriendly for today's "spell it out" standards, but a good amount of RPG'ers have been asking for less hand holding, maybe we can't go back home.
Combat maybe tricky at first, but when you learn it and it will be before you get out of the first area, you are a ton wiser. If you balance skills to say the first half of the first part of the game we have, when each person comes up to speed, they are going to dominate from there.
But this is how it sits today, I bet there so significant changes for launch.
