It seems your main crime here is having played the game fairly, without investing in any of the overpowered classes or skills or exploits to get the job done. Your party is more or less the same stock party I use, and I find it keeps you from ever getting too powerful as to be godly, or too weak as to be boring.
You’ve also described better than most what makes the game so great – yet ironically, you also feel this is what makes it so bad. From my perspective, you got the lucky experience. You didn’t cheat or try to create overpowered builds. And you were handed out a tough challenge around every corner that you still managed to overcome by the skin of your teeth – that’s the sort of play through I enjoy the most.
Mostly on these forums you read how the game is ‘too easy’, but who knows how it’s being exploited for people to come to that view. Your critique is more familiar to how I experienced it, and I’d say the majority of other players as well. Except for the complaint about the gold shortage – I always had more than enough of that to buy plenty of ‘cool stuff’, and was never left wanting.
So the thing is, to me the game puts up a very fair challenge in the manner you described (when you play fairly, with balanced builds). I wouldn’t want to see it made less challenging. However, it may need more difficulty options, to allow you to dial it down, if that’s what you feel it needs. But I believe they already said they’d have more options on release. So the difficulty you describe should definitely be kept as one of those options for people who like it.
