I've been playing DOS2's tactician mode for 15-20 hours. I've been browsing the Larian/Steam forums every now and then while I was playing and I've seen plenty of people complain about the difficulty mode. I didn't pay too much attention to the complaints as I was doing relatively fine myself, but now I find myself getting less excited every time I get into a new fight. At first I could live with enemies being significantly stronger than in the early access version. I mean, it is to be expected considering I'm playing on a higher difficulty mode, but now I've reached the point where I feel the damage numbers simply are overinflated to the point where it adds nothing but tedium to the encounters.
I've played and beat DOSEE's tactician mode multiple times and honour mode a single team, trying out a new party setup every playthrough. While I don't personally considering D:OS1's skill schools too balanced it was still possible to get through the game with almost any setup or build. In DOS2 I decided to go in with the same party setup I beat the early access version with: a 2h melee warrior, a scoundrel, a huntsman with supplementary hydro/aero magic and a geo/pyro/aero magic user. Now, a couple of hours into act 2 I've had to rebuild the latter two into pure physical damage dealers and I've had to give healing and magic/physical armour restoration spells to almost all four of my characters. In my most recent fight I came across a level 10 void enemy that dealt 400 damage with its basic attacks. Most of my characters have around 500 health and between 50 and 150 physical armour. I spend most of the fight replenishing my warrior and occasionally my scoundrel's health and both armour types because they were the only ones capable of actually dealing sufficient damage against the monster. Even though I kept the boss stunned as much as I possibly could it was also accompanied by five (?) lesser enemies that each could two-hit my characters' armour and constantly stun/curse them. In the act 1 fight again Alexander half of my party members would frequently go from having 100% of either their physical or magic armour up to losing half of their health to a single attack because the damage is so absurdly inflated that no armour can keep up with it unless you spend at least 2 out of 4 AP every turn replenishing your own armour.
I haven't been a huge fan of DOS2's armour system ever since I first discovered it, but during the EA version I could live with its restrictions and rules because they also applied to the enemies. Sure, they could break my armour and turn me into a pincushion, but I could do the exact same to them. On tactician mode I can hardly leave a dent in their armour before they (with a single spell) has depleted my armour and half of my health. The worst part is that even if I do manage to break down their armour I still have to rely on a lucky dice roll to determine if I end up dealing damage to them. Even though the game says I have a 90% chance to hit the enemy it feels a lot more like 50% - I thought the entire idea behind the new armour system was to remove the uncertainty and RNG-based nature behind attacks and status effects?
DOS1EE's tactician mode did at certain times increase the difficulty in questionable ways, namely by adding elemental immunities to some encounters, creating additional enemy spawns and giving the enemies increased initiative. Some of those were annoying at times but at least they actually added something new to the encounters. So far in DOS2 they've just made the enemies hit harder. I'm pretty sure I can count the amount of encounters where tactician mode actually added something new [when compared to the early access classic mode version] on a single hand. My approach to most of the fights is the exact same as it was during the beta, except this time I spend more time buffing myself because the enemies get the luxury of ignoring my armour because of their increased damage.
I can't even bring a token mage anymore because it's ten times more efficient to simply stack one armour type. Furthermore half of the stats seem to have been either changed or dumped down. Initiative/Wits is seemingly completely pointless because the combat turns are decided differently (?) now. Many of the skill bonuses have been changed to plain 5% damage increases, removing the potential depth the older stats had.
Considering Larian claim(ed) to be 'reading it all' based on a sticky on this part of the forums it confuses me that Tactician mode was allowed to be shipped in this state, especially considering the numerous complaints about the armour, stats system and a lot more.
