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.
Yes, there would have been something very wrong with the game if you had been able to jump in with both feet and just play the game by clicking the mouse here and there...;)
You don't need to spend "an hour or two"--you can mouse over the descriptions and select the ones that most appeal to you based on your limited understanding of the game. You will, in all probability, start over more than once. It's part of a normal learning curve in an epic game.
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.
The idea in these games is that you explore the countryside and the towns. When you find merchants you *map them*. In fact, you should be actively mapping everything you don't want to have to remember. Mapping is also a common practice in rpgs. A miserly hour spent exploring won't uncover much in this game, it's so huge--and you won't be able to progress until your party advances sufficiently to be able to defeat the natives...;) Take the time to map--you'll be glad you did.
Having every npc you meet offer to sell you anything you wanted---terrible idea...;)
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.
Your problem is that you aren't willing to take the time to learn how to play the game according to its rules--rather, you are deciding how you think that you would like the game to play and you are trying to force the game to play that way. Square peg in round hole--the game will not comply.
(You are not supposed to "manage to kill" the robot in the cave. If you were taking your time playing the game and exploring and building your quest library you would *know* what you are supposed to do with the "skeleton riding the robot" before you walk into the cave for the first time.)
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.
You cannot win in combat in this game *without* making a large number of choices during combat. You are simply demonstrating, again, that you haven't yet learned how to play the game. You really need to pay attention to the tutorials because you've missed a lot, obviously. If you aren't making choices for every player in every turn in every combat, you are not playing the game correctly. (This is not a click-fest like Diablo and thank goodness for that...;))
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.
This sums up your problem. You don't know what you are doing in the game and only dimly see that as an impediment to playing the game.
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So here are some suggestions that would make things better (only suggestions):
Trying to be diplomatic about this...but attempting to make suggestions about a game you clearly don't yet know how to play is...ridiculous...Come back when you've learned how to play the game, is my advice...
One final tip: if you think this game is or should be about "killing stuff" and that the quests are incidental and unimportant then you need to go ahead and stop playing and save yourself much more frustration. Like all epic rpgs worthy of the title, if you don't discover & work the quests you cannot get very far into the game until you start doing that. The largest rewards of XP, by far, come through quest completion. Indeed, if you are not curious about the quests in the game then it clearly isn't for you. Flip side is that if you discover and complete the quests you grow in the game world to the degree that you can complete the game--that's the whole idea. All decent rpgs work this way. Without entertaining quest lines the game would bore me senseless...;)
