I've been playing the campaign, release version for about 15-20 hours cooperatively with my friend. He created a mage based character and I created a melee-based tank, with a focus on damage mitigation.
Although things did seem pretty balanced initially, the usefulness of my melee character has steadily dropped off as we finished the first section of the game, and my character is now basically a spectator now that we have moved on to Silverglen. This is a bit frustrating because of the significant time investment and lack of ability to reset skill points or remake any part of my character whatsoever, so I'm going to explain for the benefit of those who have not yet begun their journey so they might avoid wasting their time, in bullet point form.
- Intelligence as a stat improves skills from every single school of magic, of which there are many. If you need to pick up something from another school of magic it is very easy to switch and pick it up, no problem.
- Strength as a stat improves only man-at-arms abilities and nothing else. Every point spent in strength is a death sentence in terms of your character's ability to branch out and choose other skills.
- Magic abilities have 100% hit chance, and damage is rarely reduced by enemy resistances.
- Melee attacks, even from abilities, have a hit chance, which is extremely hard to keep even above 80%, unless you spend all your points in strength (see above). Melee attack damage is further reduced by enemy armor, which enemies have a LOT of on hard mode.
- Man-at-arms skills have extremely long cooldowns. The basic heal has a 15(!) turn cooldown, the only mobility skill has an appallingly long cooldown as well. Even the (terrible) whirlwind ability has a 6(!!!) turn cooldown. It also has a chance to actually miss every target and has an extremely high AP cost and is one of the only multi-target abilities you will ever get.
- Most magic skills have an extremely low cooldown. You could permanently stunlock enemies if you wanted by spamming lightning based skills, repeatedly summon elementals to tank as soon as they are killed, etc. Because there are no resources like mana in the game, having access to multiple schools of magic (see above) means you can always use powerful abilities every turn.
- Melee characters also have to contend with field hazards that mages do not. As anyone who plays this game knows the battlefield quickly becomes a raging inferno or toxic death cloud if you have a mage in your party, and often even if you don't. These hazards are not lightly damaging, they are _extremely_ damaging and even with strong defenses you will mostly be sitting in the sidelines because you are unable to move in to attack.
- Mages aren't _really_ less durable than melee characters, even if you went sword and board and wear heavy armor. The best tanking abilities in the game are the summon and shield spells which are available in all schools of magic for mages, with extremely low cooldowns. You will also get great mobility and healing spells again with low cooldowns. As melee there are 0 abilities in the game that actually affect agro, so you won't even be drawing enemies to you as a form of utility.
- Speaking of defenses, heavy armor doesn't mitigate magic or elemental damage, which is probably over 50% of the damage in the game. Additionally, wearing heavy armor reduces your AP recovery and incurs movement penalties, further exacerbating the above problems.
In summary, don't bother. Really. Don't. If I sound a little annoyed I really am. I didn't think that starting this game there would be only one way to play but apparently that is currently the case, and I need to throw my 20 hours out the window and start over. Even if I was okay with losing the time, I mean come on, part of the fun of a game like this is the variety; the choices, the customization. If there's only one way to play successfully that really diminishes the fun.
