You skated right around the problem he was bringing up lol
Uhh, kinda. To be honest, I never saw enemies go through "seemingly impassable" terrain or anything that'd break chokepoints.
First off, Im not looking to "dumb" the game down or make it easier. My personal comfort level is playing on Tactician mode in EE, and even that's pretty easy once power creep sets in. So there's no need to be defensive.
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TL;DR--lack of accurate feedback for AoE targeting, LoS difficult to predict, unintuitive battlefield control systems--->**************
My observation based on limited play, was chiefly that concepts in the game are striking me as much less intuitive than in the original game. The OPs point about AOE spells not giving accurate feedback on their actual area of effect is an example. Making tactical situations easier to read is not "dumbing" the game down--it takes quite a lot of skill to create a game where players can intuit tactical situations at a glance.
The fight that jumps to mind is the early fight against the crocodiles on the beach. That fight took a lot of trial and error the first time I approached it, because I couldn't find an effective way to keep the crocs from reaching my back row almost effortlessly. I restarted the fight from the raised wooden platform because it looked like it had a "wall" of stoney material to its right that would have read as impassible in the previous game that would have forced the crocs to travel in a path around it to get to me. So I laid down an AOE there, but they just walked through it for minimal damage and walked right through that stoney ledge and right past my "tank" to chomp on my squishies. Obviously the crocs have ranged and teleportation abilities that make this sort of thinking useless, but Im just illustrating my point.
That's not the only example of not being able to trust intuition to make tactical decisions. I'm reserving judgement until I've got more playtime under my belt, but I strongly suspect that I hate the new armor system. It makes no sense to me that some unarmored rogue can just run through your carefully placed patch of burning ground with impunity to stab your wizard to death, because he has some sort of arbitrary blue bar left.
I'm not trying to make an argument for rigid realism in a fantasy tactical battle game. But games should have some sort of internal logic. In the last game it was intuitive...you set terrain on fire or put down a poison cloud and no one could come through it without paying a price, unless they were specifically (and again, intuitively--makes sense that fire elementals are not affected by fire) immune to those elements, or benefiting from situational spell protection.
This system feels much more gamey and arbitrary, requiring you to whittle away different colored bars with different flavored attacks before enemies will suffer the logical consequences of a specific effect. I'm not warming to it as yet.
I'm also experiencing seemingly arbitrary spread of battlefield terrain effects. One party member runs *away* from a patch of fire, but then slips on some ice and is suddenly on fire, and has also somehow set the party member next to him on fire. A party member is hit by a poison arrow near a patch of fire, and that somehow extends the patch of fire underneath him as well.
I'm not saying there aren't mechanical reasons for these things happening--I'm saying you can't easily predict them from visual evidence, which is an impediment to tactical decision making.
