Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Enhanced Edition Really disappointed w/ EE difficulty balance

To start w/ here, I'm a longtime fan of the 'top-down CRPG,' got into online gaming w/ Ultima Online, savored every bit of Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, PST, Fallout 1 & 2, and have been looking for similar experiences, something to carry the torch, since Black Isle's heyday. Seeing games like Divinity Original Sin & Pillars of Eternity being made, and being successful, alongside the more mainstream RPGs made by Bioware & Bethesda has been a bright spot for me. I'm no stranger to these games being extremely difficult at times and sometimes confusing, refusing to hold your hand through quests & puzzles like old-school point and click adventure games. I'll admit that I was a little turned off by the... eh, slapstick comedy of DOS, so I never really gave it a chance. I played the original as far as Silverglen as I remember, but I never got into it enough to feel comfortable with the game's mechanics. When DOS2 Early Access arrived, I jumped right in anyway to try it out, really enjoyed it, and wanting more, I finally got back into DOSEE and felt fully comfortable with the game.

I played through the game to completion on the normal difficulty and barring a few boss fights (not including the final boss, though the fights just before it were somewhat difficult), I found it to be extremely easy. Characters died rarely in combat & were rarely ever in danger it; when they did it was almost always to environmental traps or lava - something I consider artificial difficulty and an annoyance, not fun. I considered myself pretty well versed w/ the game's mechanics by this point and I wanted more, different characters and more of a challenge, so I started w/ Tactician Mode expecting more & tougher enemies.

I noticed after doing the first few hours of busy work in Cyseal that I was unable to handle the level 8 undead you can unearth in the cemetary, and considered that a good sign; in my previous playthrough I was able to stunlock them and whittle them down w/ very little effort at level 3. The ones in the tunnels you can reach from there were no trouble for my party. I wrapped up in Cyseal and left town to the west w/ my party at level 4, into the small level 3-4 zone that ends w/ the lighthouse boss fight. The start of the first fight seemed pretty normal, then 2 Bolt-Striken Zombies are spawned that proceeded to dismantle my party from full health. They hit (regular punches) for 1/5-1/3 of a health bar, stun on hit, and melee attacks/touch spells against them can also cause stunning; 3 of my characters are melee-oriented & most of my offensive magic at this point is touch spells. This is early game, so none of my characters have high resistances, elemental shielding or air avatar. I killed everything else and 1 of the zombies, but 2 of my party members had been stunned & killed, 1 was still stunned, and the last zombie stunned the other one, killed her w/ the next hit, then went back & killed the other one w/ one hit. This was the second time I'd tried the fight- the first time I was surprised by them, my "tank" was stunned & killed almost instantly after they showed up, and I reloaded to see if I could kill them quickly from range or CC them (I couldn't).

Demoralized, I decided to see if this was a fluke, an unusually tough fight, so I took my party to the north gate to try the fight w/ the level 5 regular zombies. They somehow initiated the fight almost as soon as I stepped out of the gate, which was actually good b/c it caused the 3 level 5 legionnaires to join in. The zombies didn't hit nearly as hard and took a little more damage from attacks than the Bolt-Stricken variety, but poison was everywhere. I destroyed the hole that was spawning them (new to this difficulty) w/ my fighter, and fought 5-6 of them at the edge of the bridge, in a giant puddle of poison that spread w/ every hit. One of the legionnaires struck one of the zombies (3 hits per turn), and each hit sprayed poison on my fighter. He died shortly after, before his turn when I could use a potion, and w/ first aid, cure poison & regeneration on cooldown. My rogue died from poison without me even realizing, she was standing in it & I had no way left to get rid of it besides turning it into fire, so I left her there. I'm not entirely sure how the knight lost enough health to die, but it happened just before the marksman finished off the last zombie. I was taking stock of how I was gonna resurrect everyone and how much it was gonna cost me or if I should just reload, when the marksman, the last surviving character, dropped dead. OK, that could have gone better, and I could have handled things better, but this is a trend - these are the first, and easiest fights in the early areas of the game, and I have wiped at both of them.

This is when I checked the options menu, and noticed that you can't change the difficulty in Tactician mode, so everything from character creation to the first however many hours ("Day 4" in in-game time) was a wash if I wanted to start over. This was perhaps the most frustrating thing about all of it, if I want to play w/ similar characters on a lower difficulty I'd have to do all the tedious early game again. (This stuff is, btw, one of the reasons I never really got into the game originally, b/c I couldn't stand to run through the early game in Cyseal, all of the repeated dialogue, looting, stealing & selling items from all the same containers, before you can really try out your characters in combat.)

At this point a few things occurred to me:

1) Tactician mode is not a step up from the normal difficulty, it's a redesign of the game, the equivalent of a hardcore mode that's usually above a "hard" difficulty (w/ honor mode being a modifier rather than a difficulty). There is no hard difficulty, the difficulty ranges from Very Easy to Easy to Hardcore to Hardcore with Permadeath.

2) The things I read and thought were exaggerations were right: you really can't use hybrid characters in Tactician Mode, or they're totally gimped. That's a pretty big deal for an RPG designed around complete character development freedom; there is very little character development freedom in Tactician, and many of the starting classes are irrelevant. I tried to use a few characters that combined combat abilities w/ a school of magic (instead of a more standard OP party w/ a Two-Handed warrior tank, maybe a Marksman & a couple of mages), and it doesn't work at all. Melee scoundrels feel really weak, even w/ backstabbing, invisibility & the related perks, which surprised me. Sword & board fighters don't seem to actually make better tanks than two-handed fighters (which is pretty counterintuitive), they trade A LOT of damage for a small chance to block. That's a large section of character types that are at worst unusable in Tactician mode, at best underpowered across the board.

3) If this is how things are... then I don't think I really have any reason to play the game again, and that's really disappointing. If I tried Tactician again, I'd need to make new characters & follow pretty strict character progression, essentially a repeat of the party I used the first time. If I played the game on normal mode... it'd just be really easy again. Unfortunately DOS2 EA is a fairly small opening zone, and I don't wanna wear myself out on it anyway, so I'm kinda at a loss. No DOS until 2 releases, I guess?