Everything you wrote was common feedback during beta. We pretty much were agreeing that Cyseal is a really slow game start, like.. there should have been a huge start dungeon (or guild) or wilderness area before Cyseal to get you up to snuff that taught you about source hunters, their guild and all that (and give you 2 levels more than you have now in Cyseal). But it was made and scripted and done, there was no way to change that anymore... the tutorial dungeon we have now was the concession Larian made to us
Then cyseal got larger because schedules were supposed to be coming and so everyone needed a bed and what not, and last minute they were canceled, but cyseal was larger all the same. All I can say is, once you are out of cyseal and level 7, the game becomes much much more fun.
As for archer.. that's true (and very weird) sometimes things that show no AOE have AOE... as for difficulty.. the tutorial dungeon teaches you to use barrels, environmental effects and scrolls. And if you buy a bunch of fireball scrolls no fight in this game (at the start) is hard. In every RPG ever made you have to stock up before battle (And funnily, steal the start location empty ,P)
Now don't get me wrong, some early fights in this game if you don't know the ins and out of the combat system are insanely hard
The Twin Fire guy? That was even hard for me, and I played in the alpha and beta, it's like a puzzle to kill these guys. I actually love that in RPG's... not everyone does though.
