NPCs have most of the time unequal armor. Mages have few physical, melees have few magical armor. Rangers are in between.
When it comes to mages, you have to take into account their ranged damage. They should not deal as much damage as melee chars. Look at the turtles on Tactician, they explode in fire and can easliy kill melee chars. Who knows what comes later?
Mages should however not deal lower damage than rangers, now that the silly magical CC got fortunately nerfed.
If we have to cheese to deal with physical, it doesn't show that the game want you to adapt have new strat. It just highlight the major flaw the game has when it comes to its combat.
The thing about that kind of cheesy difficulty is that it's
only difficult when you don't know it will happen. Now that you know about the exploding turtle, melee just have to keep their health pool above the surprisebuttseck range and no longer is it threatening.
If they really want mages to do well again without overbuffing the enemies that can actually play mage with their +50% damage and +5 ini, make it so that increasing int actually does something else outside "More damage". Something like "Every int invested above 10 also grants 2% magic armor piercing" or something so I don't just press the skip turn button when it's the mage's turn to move and teleport is on CD.
