First, thank you guys for making this game. Many of the core parts are great, and you definitely have good story. With that in mind, I want to bring up alot of quality-of-life things that bother me about the game.
1. The total skill set is overwhelming at best
The many MANY skills you can invest points into is strait up confusing. When you make characters, you see a list, and unless you spend an hour or two just to get a good idea of how each skill matters and which ones to invest, you end up allocating skills poorly. I had to restart my characters because I did not know you needed to save up points to advance skills beyond level 1. I have to play a few battle before I understand initiative and other things, and even with the tutorial I had a tenuous grasp.
2. Merchants are a mess.
You had a great idea: make every NPC able to trade. Unfortunately, it just causes frustration for me. e.g. The merchants are spaced far apart and I had to look up online just to see where certain skill books were. I understand that you want the players to explore the city, but it should not require 1 hour of concentration to figure out where all the best merchants are. Also, it is annoying that when I trade, switching characters will reset the trade window. If I am pooling items to pay for a skill book, it is annoying to have to exit the trade window, move items then, trade again. The same with gold taking up space. There should be shared party gold.
3. All the enemies are higher level than me
This could be my own fault, but I swear enemies are 1-2 levels higher than me. I did the side quest with the cave with a skeleton riding a huge machine (that was cool stuff btw). I was able to kill him, but the men in the cave did about 2/3 of the damage which is not fun in and of itself. I should have felt like the hero, instead of the help. As far as enemy difficulty, I have no idea how I was supposed to do it differently. I did all the run around quests in Cyseal, started with the lighthouse and northern league expedition, and when I ran out of places, I explored new ones. Never were the enemies AT my level, always above. Again, maybe I am incompetent, but I have no idea what I could do differently.
4. Combat can be very confusing and you end up not making many choices
I understand that you want players to have Loremaster before learning about their enemies weaknesses, but in reality, it would be very nice to know enemies weaknesses and immunities. I have Loremaster 2, and all I get to see is their HP and AP. It would feel more frustrating to actually know how well a spell will work before I use it. The undead machine thingie I mentioned before was apparently weak to air (I think?), and did not know until I used an air spell just to spice it up. Knowing their weaknesses is fun, but keeping them hidden will make it frustrating.
Along these same lines, I have been seeing things take damage and not know why. I know walking over a terrain will cause damage (like fire and poison). But more than once I killed a zombie boar, which exploded to do fire, poison, and air damage. Or it went to an enemies turn, and a ghoul exploded in fire even though they were not on fire. This could just be me being stupid, but more than once I've had a hard time understanding everything going on.
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So here are some suggestions that would make things better (only suggestions):
1. Put all the major merchants in the town center, possibly creating new NPC's. Intuitively, I go to the fletcher to buy bows, and I can infer that I can buy marksman skills too. You can still keep the other ones (like captain Aureus holding on to man-at-arms skill books), but add extra NPC's so when I decide to upgrade my party I know exactly where to go.
2. When a player already has increased a skill from 0 to 1, when they hover over it, have a text say, "you need 2 points to increase this skill". I had a level 5 character with 1 skill point in many things before I realized how badly I messed up.
3. Just list all the stats on a monster no matter your lore master. You can hid HP and AP b/c those allow choices to be made from turn to turn, but if I can see who is vulnerable to what, then my choices feel meaningful.
4. Somehow, organize merchant's trading window so that books are in skill order (i.e. level 1 skillbooks, then 4....), b/c i have to hunt for the skills. It also wouldn't hurt for the tooltip to show an icon to help me see what it is.
5. Why do you give me so many level 1 companions in the hall of heroes, when I am level 3 by the time I can afford one? Also, why are there so many companions for each level? Why not have a set number of companions (2 rogues, 2 shadowblades, 2 archers, etc.) and allow them to be at your level, no matter what it is?
I apologize for length, but many of these things really got to me as I was playing on my day off, and feel like they could be much better.
