I really feel cheated when it comes to Initiative when you look at the fact that Larian hasn't communicated anything at all on it after a full year of early access with the "old" system which as far as I know never caused major issues for players. The current turn order system cause a series of problems that can be very problematic in some cases:
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[*]- First it is very poorly described in game how initiative actually works and extremly misleading. As someone who specialized in UX design I can't stress enough how giving bad/false information to players is such a terrible idea and can create really significant displeasure regarding the game.
[*]- The lowest initiative on the team will played at 7th or 8th in the turn order every single time which basically means that this player (and the 3rd as well in a lesser way) will have by default a way less significant impact on the fight. If you decide to place your tank first it's good because he/she can get a good position in battle but then your damage come quite late into the turn order. Likewise placing your "support/healer" too early is a significant waste but having him/her playing as 7th or 8th character can be way too late and cause death of an ally.
[*]- I won't get too much into the impact it has on Wits being pretty underwhelming because it has been said already several times in this topic better than I would anyway but it still is a very important point specifically when I really love how all the other Attributes are pretty balanced as it stands
[*]- It very severely limit the range of tactical options available to the player. Before you could easily setup a combo between two characters with very close Initiative (like 11 and 10) to have nice interactions between the two, and overall you could have a clear idea of how your team will interact with each other. With this sytem you can be sure that A, B, C and D will always play in the same order but the only factor changing is if they are playing the odd or even turns which is not even really important anyway.
[*]This sytem creates extremly frustrating situations when enemies die as stated above. I lost battles litterally because of that because I planned my actions in advance for the next turn but by killing an enemy it moved another enemy turn much earlier and ruined all my plans. This system feels like playing casino machine more than a strategy game and it's a shame when everything else is really well thought out (in my opinion at least).
[*]- Similarly this system causes some very strange cases the biggest example being the "puzzle/fight" against the puppets at the very end of the game. The puppets tend to suicide a LOT (which is intended I guess) and to revive on the same turn. The issue is then that anytime they die they are replaced by another puppet playing its turn because of the new turn order system. This means that sometimes a single turn of one puppet can take about a minute of seeing puppets cycling between death and running around over and over. I genuinely wanted to throw my computer out of the window when I endured that absurd fight specially when the puzzle isn't even hard or any interesting whatsoever. It's only one example but there is many other instances with summons in particular that are very frustrating.
[*]- And while I am at it this new system creates super bizarre and hard to understand interactions with summons as well (in general the Initiative of Summons is very very strange and needs to be clarified a lot in my opinion)
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I really really really hope that you will come back to the old working very well system of Initiative. The whole point of it was that if you invested in it you could have the upper hand but at the cost of less of other stats (damage, health etc.). It never felt broken to me specially when the armors mechanics make it impossible to completely disable the enemy team on turn one.
And I'd like to say again that it's really bizarre and unfair that you never communicated on this massive change with us the community before going to full release.
NB: Sorry for the presentation of my post I used the "list" forum option to make a clear and clean list but nothing happens it makes it worse than anything else soooo, sorry.
