I have to agree with everything the OP said. This AI update is one thing, we need smarter AI in our games. But you can't have an intelligent AI that ALSO is designed around a dumb AI. Most games tend yo give the AI overbuffed stats or skills to compensate for them being dumb. This update KEPT the overbuffed NPC's with a vast repertoire of effective skills, metric crap tons of armor and damage stats, and then made them smarter to boot.
And to make matters worse, the update also took away many of the avenues for the player to compete with the OP NPC's. Getting comparable gear is impossible, getting necessary skills to compete is impossible, and just leveling up in general is very hard.
I played for about 4 hours last night, and it was just bashing my head against a brick wall the entire time.
I have tried setting up counters, like putting pools on the ground to electrify, or buffing my party, but anything that takes more than the first round to do, guarantees a loss, because you won't get a round two with most of your charaters.
So true. And ground effects don't work anyway - remember that MA most NPCs have? Yeah, it's usually so high that you don't even have enough damage to break it down on the first round. Even if you do a concentrated salvo on one NPC, it might BARELY break their MA. On ONE NPC.
Before, a way to compete with the NPCs was for example to use Snipe on ranged guys from stealth to initiate, then CC the melee guards with mages and clean up. Now it's not possible because EVERYONE has sky-high armour ratings, and player has no way to whittle them down quickly enough. Couple this with an inability to progress past Level 2-3 due to impossible encounters.
One-handed strikes should STILL made to only cost 1AP. 2AP for an extremely weak 1-handed strike is useless and Sucker Punch does not make up for that lack of damage.
Oh, and I also noticed that Necromancers can no longer pick Shackles of Pain. It wasn't an OP skill. Is this Larian's version of "just how difficult can we make this Alpha"? xD
Well, at least the Magisters are finally the scary, invincible force they were supposed to be. I'll be banging my head against the wall (e.g playing this game) for some more, see if I can crack some encounters.
