I played with the default options (downloaded from nexusmods), and the loot felt very good. I can't recall an encounter that didn't gave me an upgrade .
Good to know that the staggering can result in a knockdown. Didn't work the first few times, then I just never tried again, except for finishing an opponent of, I think.
As for the gear, taking a look at all my chars at the very end, everyone has on average
278,5 armor (magic and physical combined)
16 attributes
2 combat abilities
1 extra ability
52.25 resistance
Unfortunately I must have overwritten my vanilla playthrough, so I can't compare, but that's a lot of stats, considering they will get a heap of buffs from the bard on top.
With a leadership of 10, I have quite a few resistances above 70 and even 80, while not even going for them since I have so much already. Also with all the valuable loot, I ended with roughly 8k gold and could easily buy every spellbook and item I wanted from the vendor.
Maybe lowering the sell price of items would help the balance a bit?
