I played through what I think is the first half of act I (through the Braccus vault) for last patch and now this one, both on classic mode, so my impressions are based on that experience. As background, I've been playing CRPG's since the days of the original Fallout and baldur's gate series, and while I'm no strategic genius, I'm also not new to the genre and am passable at the kind of tactical combat in Divinity.

Overall, I like starting at lower numbers for damage, health, etc., and enjoy the additional skills and consumables enemies now use. Fights feel much more dynamic and scrappy. However, there are a couple aspects of the changes that kind of felt bad to me. These all kind of relate to the player party perpetually feeling weak and underpowered relative to the enemies you're facing. Maybe I'm a wimp, or this balances out better later on and I just haven't gotten there yet, but I spent much more time feeling frustrated with this patch compared to the last one. It seemed like I didn't have the tools to succeed without retrying every other fight multiple times due to wipes or cripplingly pyrrhic victories, which was detrimental to my enjoyment. Below are a the points that really stood out to me as contributing to this feeling.

- It feels icky when enemies start reguarly using source skills on you. Being a sourcerer is a 'special' thing, so when I got into the marshes and every skeleton archer or pyromancer started bombarding me with source attacks, it was pretty gross and felt a touch unfair due to how scarce source is as a resource (at least at that stage of the game.) Overall, unless source and source skills become so abundant players can start using them every fight, I would suggest reserving enemies who use source attacks for bosses or other suitably epic encounters.

- It doesn't seem like enemy physical and magic armor is in proper balance with the now lowered damage and equipment values for the player party. It wasn't unusual to face enemies of equal level with 2-3x the combined physical and magic armor of my characters, which often led to attempts at exploiting the AI or abusing save scumming to give me the opportunity to chip away at enemy defenses while desperately trying to keep my party up through all the status afflictions enemies threw at me. To be clear, I don't mind them trying to incapacitate my party (that's just good strategy) but I kept finding my characters underwater from the first round, while it took multiple turns to chip through an enemy's defences to afflict them with an equivalently debilitating effect.

- A few of the early game enemies seem to deal outsized damage. The crocodiles can body a player character in like two hits, and so can the melee dogs. These enemies have solid defenses though, and require substantial investment to incapacitate even one, which gets frustrating when they come in groups.

- Frozen shard seems pretty OP when enemies have used it on me (I don't know if this skill is available to the player yet, if it is I haven't found it.) It's basically a fireball that stuns, which, given the low player armor values I mentioned above, meant that I had almost my whole party frozen from the first round of a couple fights, with the only character getting to do anything before getting locked down being Ifan. I would suggest making this chill, and freeze only targets that are already chilled. Compared to something like fireball (which it appears to be the water magic equivalent of), freeze is substantially more powerful than burning, and is available in a skill category with heals and a defense boost which is a big deal. I imagine if this skill is available to players, it's enough to push hydromancy into being the most powerful skill set by far, even with the nerf to hail storm.

All of this said, I'm loving the game even if some of the balancing in the current patch feels relatively discouraging, so while I'm trying to offer constructive criticism here, please recognize I'm on the edge of my seat in anticipation of the final version, and really think you have the makings of something really special here. Thanks for all the hard work you guys are putting into thie great game!