A bit of context:
I've played a few months ago on hard until Silverglen because I had read of feedbacks saying the game was too easy from that point on. That's why I waited until this patch.
I then played (still on hard) from my old save to the end with Jahan, Madora, a fire witch and a ranger. Here's what I thought of the game.
The story: nothing amazing but it worked. I did appreciate the humor from time to time though. I wasn't paying much attention to the story though so I don't have much to say about it.
The puzzles:
1) I really disliked the puzzles where you had to find the hidden lever or whatever. I think it's a pretty cheap way of making a puzzle and not fun at all for the players.
2) I loved the puzzle where you had the clues that you had to piece together or where thinking was required (room of portals, mage's puzzle with the morphing cat/rat/dog). You should have done more of those, especially when it was important to the progression of the story.
The fights:
I didn't really try to min/max that much until the final fight where I used a bit of the crafting (adding elemental damage, improving my crossbow, etc...)
Most of the fights before the ones on the garden were fun and challenging, you had to actually think about what you were going to do. I don't know how they were before the patch but it was pretty nice when I played. I would have liked more diversity for fighters skills on the later levels. Moreover, the ranger's skills don't seem to use the weapon directly and can't miss, I think they should be more like the warrior.
The last boss fights however were disappointing. I did them when I was lvl21 and fixed Leandra's soulforge.
The first problem was that the Trife went down too easily. I think it was due to the fact that he had low resists against my crossbow (water+physical) that I had just boosted before the fight. With 1K+ (2K+ on crits). Even though I targeted his summons with my ranger first, he died within 3 turns.
The second problem was the fight with the dragon, he was too sensitive to chill/freeze and died within 4 turns.
What happened:
1st turn my ranger use luck, haste and kill a summon with a critical (33% chance), my other characters use buffs/summons.
2nd turn I kill all but one summon that is knocked down by Madora. Jahan chills the dragon.
3rd turn, my ranger removes almost 5K hp from the dragon with 2 criticals and then the boss gets frozen by the hail attack from Jahan.
Start of 4th turn, my ranger finishes off the still frozen dragon and the fight ends with my other 3 characters still available to do some damage (even though their damage was negligible compared to the ranger).
The problem was that the dragon was too sensitive to crowd control, didn't have enough hp and/or resists, the summons didn't have unsummons like the death knights and the dragon targeted the summons first. His damage didn't matter since he never hit any of my characters. He didn't have enough summons to threaten me either.
To sum it up, the game was very good and my only grips were:
- the puzzle where you have to find small objects and the like
- the final fights were too easy, the main problem was that the bosses themselves were too easy to handle or they didn't have enough summons to distract my ranger.
