Hold on here. In CRPGs you're not generally expected to know the mechanics when you start out. Normal mode is usually scaled such that a non mix-max party will have a pretty good chance at winning any giving encounter. As the game goes on, difficult ramps up. If you're played cRPGs before, normal mode shouldn't be a frustrating experience with a good difficulty curve.
I'm a long time cRPG player and some of the early fights are downright unfair. IE you have pretty much zero chance of winning them the first time through even if you understand the mechanics pretty well. Normal mode is what I'd expect for late game fights or difficult settings. You're tossed right into the deep end and expected to swim.
I enjoy a tactical challenge, but they're going to lose a lot of players with the difficulty curve in this game.
It's not very difficult, though. Anyone who has played as many games as the OP claims to have should've easily been able to understand how to make an invincible party from the moment they started creating their characters. You want damage, crowd control, healing, and summons. Pick a mage with water, air, and earth magic and pick healing/spider/teleport, at least that's the first thing I did, and I never played beta.
The only fight I had any trouble with was the aforementioned fight at the cave, with the 3 boars and zombies and skeletons and such, as the archers would chain-cc my guys to death at the start of the fight, but I got around that by just summoning summons in their faces so they'd CC them instead. Could've bought a fireball spell to clear out all of them, but it wasn't necessary.
I can understand someone who has never played any games like this having a lot of issues, but not someone like the OP, unless they're going out of their way to make things harder for themselves in order to complain about it, instead of trying to find solutions to their problems.
Even a mageless team can just buy scrolls to get through the hardest fights early-game, which was the first thing I did after losing to the boarfight the first time, though it turned out I didn't end up needing them.
