I think the ramp up of difficulty in tactical games is usually to slow, in this case it starts off incredibly slow but becomes too easy. Still, I do feel like NOT save scumming equipment would negate this feeling of content not being challenging enough.
I understand you can purchase many of those items at the vendors or craft equipment comparable to blues of a similar level.
Glass cannon doesn't feel TOO strong for me on hard. Even with leach my warrior goes down, and CC still owns my bacon even though I am heavily investing in willpower and bodybuilding. My mage could probably survive XXX turns by spamming invisibility, but if my entire party got wiped I wouldn't spend 16 turns trying to wipe the enemies out single handedly.
If I F5 F8 for scum-chesting and scum-saves of course it's going to become trivial. But what if I wasn't doing that?
If Larian based everything in the game off of people save scumming then you would struggle to succeed in the game WITHOUT doing it. They'd be taking the decision making out of your hands to do this or that and simply tell you to do X.
I don't think we're praising this game because it has the most interesting story, or is arbitrarily the hardest game ever (LONG WAR XCOM SERIOUSLY). Personally, if I can blow up a gas cloud, if I can create a rain cloud and shock it to create a lightning cloud, if I can teleport the enemy caster into my party for a melee - I'm just excited that I can do that.
In a way what I am hearing from everybody who is complaining about sneak 5, leach, and 100% resistance is that they found a way to win most fights absolutely. So what. In all of the BG and Icewind Dale games, you could win just about any fight with a decent ranged team and Summoning 1 and Summoning 2. You had other options, of course, but there were always fairly surefire ways to win a fight.
You still have these options in D:OS. You can use sneak and telekinesis to move barrels around toward enemies. You can have strength heroes carry them and use mage teleport to open up with them. You can have two archers who specialize to frontload damage (guerilla, witchraft, marksmanship, scoundrel with crossbow) and abuse it all day. You could create the dragon knight, who is sort of a fairly low int battle mage who can jump into battle and cast explode to heal himself by utilizing the over 100% resistance rule. You could run a party of four mages (make sure you get the undead and wolf summon for anti element creatures) and abuse the summoning schools, and a number of strong abilities and combos (they can also abuse elemental shields, for damage mitigation, even on hard mode with glass cannon). You could go lone wolves and manage to survive through scrolls and safe play to the point where you get glass cannon and run a rogue/mage combo and abuse sneak 5 to just kill enemies without them being able to react.
And any build is going to be the least nominal at X point in the game and the most nominal at Y point in the game. Why build a late game character if you won't enjoy the early, why metagame if you're looking for a challenge?
Will this game inevitably be tweaked and modded into an even better game? Absolutely! But don't complain about a gem because it has a smudge on it after you have touched it.
