Multiple problems make it too easy in the mid- and later game. To me, it generally boils down to the party getting progressively stronger than the foes, who don't come close to keeping up. And it's not like their AI improves so they fight smarter either.
Here's a few dynamics that occur:
- Mages have far more spells and, provided you build them halfway intelligently, the spells are more effective and are able to be re-used much more frequently. So, locking down the enemy with crowd control is easily achievable. Healing means the team is never in jeopardy. Summons are potent, durable and can distract multiple foes. And so on.
- Keeping the enemy at range offers a huge advantage. With crowd control and a bit of planning, it's easy to hold back the enemy, whose ranged abilities, if they have them at all, usually pale in comparison to the party's.
- Magical arrows, potions and other resources (e.g., food) are effectively unlimited. There's no countdown timer on these, so you can just spam them with impunity. But it never or almost never comes to that.
- Enemy initiative seems consistently poor, so your party almost always goes first. This lets you set the tempo of the battle and puts them on the defensive from the start.
- With min/max "theorycrafting," the system can easily be abused. Warriors can achieve extraordinary damage mitigation, for example. This is of course true of nearly all games that offer the level of flexibility D:OS does.
Given all this, simply upping enemy hit points or number would hardly be ideal, though it would make things tougher, to be sure. Ideally, you'd have countdown timers on abilities that would limit, say, the number of heals a character has access to in a single encounter. Summons would be weaker without being ineffective. And, of courses, enemies would be smarter in target selection and general tactics.
But this is almost certainly asking for a different game.
- Geezer
