Long post, beware.

To be honest, after reading every (almost every, skipped some at the end) post, I got quite discouraged. Hiver really shouldn't have used foul language, but I believe that TsunAmik and Ellezard think they're speaking for the majority when they, I would believe are the minority in all this. Or they truly believe they're right. If you believe you're right there's just no way about it, even if the proven smartest person in the world would tell you differently, you would say "No. My point is right, because of this." If you're disproved then you'll try to alter your point to take the lead of the conversation again and the smartest person in the world would have to tail around your every branch-argument until he gets tired of it.

(I'm not implying anyone's a genius or stupid here, just using an example of someone leading others on, doing their best not to be proven wrong, even if they just might could be.)

Either way, I only made an account to reply here because I noticed people evading the main issue here. I got in this thread in the first place when I noticed that my party is not going first despite how many points of initiative I invested in them. I usually like to game casually, if I feel like min-maxing, then I'll min-max the best solution, but I prefer a game with a lot of diversity. Ellezard keeps talking of the game as if there is only ONE, single solution. That is to read a guide and buff the **** out of your damage and follow procedures. I don't agree with this.

Anyway, enough of that. Min-Maxing is one way to play which people like Ellezard like to do, but they don't like it when Min-Maxing becomes too easy. Then why do you do it? They do it because it's there, the most optimal way to play it, if it's too easy, boring. If min-maxing is challening, then yes, awesome. But you forget to consider that not everyone likes min-maxing. While tactician mode should be more challenging and not allow willy-nilly builds of the most stupid things, it should not limit the whole game to a single play style. That's just... making everything else redundant. I'm not saying the game is limited to a single play style right now, I've beat the first chapter with various builds now. What I'm saying is, 'round-robin' is limiting a lot of options. Like many before me mentioned.

The whole notion of tactics... Okay... Let's think about this now... Tactics. You know every ambush location, every thing the enemy can do, just don't know how they'll come about doing it yet. You know how many of them will be, how to place your characters. Everything is calculated. While it is sort of tactics... Knowing everything about your enemy while your enemy cannot respond to any of it because you're practically god in this scenario... You know, your reason about this being tactical is lost here, what's the point of 'tactics' here? It's not tactics, it's just blatant manipulation of 'history' because you know what happens because you went through it, so you did the optimal solution.

The whole thing about tactics is that tactics happens in the moment. The first time you got into that scenario without any previous knowledge of what will happen, without save-loading, without having tested your tactics before. Maybe someone before that area told you it could happen, maybe a note, maybe something felt odd and you were careful. That's tactics, but knowing about it before-hand in some god-like out of area knowledge... I wouldn't call that tactics, though I'm not sure what word to put to it.

What I want from this game? Initiative to mean something other than party-placement. Heck, for some real tactical gameplay. I would love if they left initiative as it was in EA and implemented unpredictable systems such as in real life which if you're battling on shore, you might get hit by a tsunami wave due to a kraken off-shore sinking a ship. Everybody gets literally knocked off their socks. (I know this is unlikely to happen, and is very improbable, but I created this scenario for my next hypothesis) Everyone's knocked down, who gets up first? First guy for initiative to move? Or would it be someone who's stronger? Higher strength usually means you'd get knocked down for less time, or might even get only pushed somewhere.

How about initiative? How come the guy with higher initiative gets to go first, rather than the guy who backstabbed him from sneak? Makes sense? I don't think so.

If your whole party is sneaking and one initiates combat, should the other party members get to move freely all they want? Doesn't seem fair or real time tactical to me. Everyone's standing still while your guys are just moving everywhere. If anything, they should get limited movement, and if they come out of sneaking they should get a bonus to initiative within the round to get an earlier move, after all, no one expected them, right? Call it the surprise factor.

Armor bonuses, I must say that while binary 100% and 0% are really not my style, I still prefer this armor system over DOS:1/EE. RNG chances are good and all, but bodybuilding and willpower can only affect so many things, it should have its limits. Still, I would prefer to have the best of both worlds. For example, something has 100 armor. You get them down to like 40. The next strike like an ability that would cause someone to bleed gets the target armor down to 2... I think the bleed effect should have a chance to be applied by this point, their armor is practically non-existant, there should have been possible skin contact.

The whole armor thing in the first place... If you bash someone's armor with a mace, it'll damage their armor, but I got to tell you something important, the guy inside should not be much better. The armor should limit TRUE DAMAGE, but it should not negate all of it. Same with magic armor. A spell shield, generally a mana shield or whatever negates all CC spells... I think that too should be Intelligence versus target's magic armor at some specific rate, if the skill check passes then check the target's stats. If the remainder of the intelligence passes whatever innate defenses the target has, then by all rights they should be turned into a chicken. (Yes, I think poly should be a magic-shield skill, not physical)

Example of this. Target has 100 Magic Armor. They also have their own intelligence of 10. They have 0 Polymorph (mind against mind). For some unknown reason your mage didn't invest in intelligence and he has 10. You have 5 Polymorph. You cast (Chicken Claw). Your 10 intelligence counts for 10 magic armor a piece (just an example of a system) so 100 magic armor. You negate their magic armor but they still have their own intelligence for you to get through. Let's say their intelligence counts for half because they're on the receiving end. So, 5. You have a poly level of 5. It's a draw, nothing changes, they barely resist. Now you hit them with a fireball and chicken claw them again and they have 68 magic armor.
10-6.8 for magic armor, you have 3.2 int to spare.
5Poly + 3.2 Int - 5 Enemy Int = 3.2! Your spell succeeded, they are now a chicken. I would love to see this kind of system, and it's not impossible, just extra work.
It doesn't have to be RNG, though low level RNG of a dice roll which is 1-5, or even 1-3 is really not that bad. I don't see why the two mentioned above are so against it, it's beyond comprehension to me.

For example this.. 3.2 to hit them with the chicken claw in your favor... But in real life your character is unable to control his/her bodily function and sneezes, losing his concentration (example of a die roll of 1) and you end up with a 4.2. While your enemy, full of fear and adrenaline of his impending doom is concentrated and ready to fight back and survive the impact. He rolls a 5. Because of your lack of concentration this ended up with a 4.2-5 = -0.8 in the enemy's favor, they barely resisted it. I mean, you tactics fanatics, can you control your sneeze and concentration 100% of the time, really? Factor that in your tactics, please.

The skill called Tentacle Lash that gives enemies atrophy if they have no more armor. All it does is make the enemy not able to use their weapons... I mean, I kind of understand the atrophy thing (not really, since once you have it, you don't lose it in one turn, per say), but a tentacle slap across your hands should have a probability to knock a weapon out of your hand, despite the heavy armor on your torso/arms/legs. Unless you literally have your glove glued to the thing.

Moving onto the point made about 4 player teleport and nuke... RNG doesn't have to be the thing to fix it... And this is the reason to turn this game into round-robin... really? Are you kidding me? This is the easiest solution ever. Someone said 4ap is an option. Yeah, why not. I think they should have it stat based. Like in the first game, if you're a weak shit with 5 strength, you can't throw a barrel at all. Same with this. If your intelligence is low, you should be able to lift a thing from only so or so far, and it being only so or so heavy. Or just one of them could change the dynamic drastically. Removing of things thereof is not necessary, it can be changed.

Now the topic of groups being AOE nuked, or boss nuked in 1-2 turns. Well... If you're a higher level than them it's only natural, but if we're talking about higher level enemies or same level, if you want to get around that, initiative groups can be avoided easy victory if the stats were configured as such. If the enemy have low initiative, they should either have higher damage, or higher health, or both depending if they're supposed elites or something. The easiest way to avoid this is by adding numbers to amount of enemies, sure, you can one hit them, or crowd 4 with teleport and nuke them. But having a variety of them spread out, you can't kill them all in one turn, though having that initiative did let you kill half of them, which is a bonus. But now your skills are on CD and you're on the defensive. If you're a DPS/TANK build, you could tank their attacks and kill them at your leisure. If you're a willy-nilly build, then you use your noggen for what spell to use to react to what they do here and there.

Of course, now and then you will always run into groups of 4 of them or so... But these should be (not always) more, elite, no? The fact that people are saying that you can spam AoE death on everything should be looked at and say, hm. Maybe we didn't give them enough health? Maybe we didn't add a higher AP requirement for stronger spells?

In Ellezard's case he min-maxes damage, he can only have so many CC spells, if he uses any in the first place. This means that after he uses his first wave of spells/abilities and damage, either the enemy's dead, or he should suffer some set-backs as everything he has should be on CD except base attacks. Because the enemy is not strong to get back up is not the fault of initiative, it's just that they're too squishy, or your items/levels make you too strong. Round-robin only limits other players of their own play style. After you nuked some heavy armored enemies, they should be able to heal and return the favor to make the battle last longer. Everything should be accounted for.

Now returning to bosses. If you can nuke a boss in 1 turn, then that's not even a boss. How could you even consider that to be a boss? That's just something stronger than other human/elf/dwarf/thing, but really, don't blame initiative on something you can CC in one turn and kill in the next. It should have higher resistances to CC, or have helpers, I mean who's stupid enough to fight a group on their own, even if they have a god-complex. And if they're not caught off guard (which is a tactic of its own, catching someone unprepared in an environment not to their liking), they should be buffed as it's their home base. They should have some kind of leverage.

Though I'll be honest right now. The people complaining that it's too easy, they're the same people who are doing their best to make it as easy as possible for themselves. They are playing the game in a min-maxing way, abusing (taking advantage of) every possible mechanic in the game, even if it's not intended to be done that way. That's why we have patches in the first place, give Larian some space to do their thing. However, if they don't like it, it should not limit the rest of us who like to relax and be nooby, going "Oh shit, my party almost wiped with one guy surviving with 30 health."

Another fact I've noticed, even in school, is that a lot of people just go with the flow, they may notice it, they may not, they may like it, they may not, but only the most extreme of the two ends will speak their mind (mostly). You never know which is the true majority/minority. I personally think that not even 70% of people who play reply on threads, they may read, but not always reply. Prove me wrong! Dare ya.

Oh, I almost forgot, it's my first post, hi all. This has been my rant.

TL:DR

Too many redundant arguments. To find out who's truly correct, LARIAN should put a poll up within their game that even the majority/minority would notice, they'd easily vote from in-game main menu if it's up there. They could look into what people truly like and don't.
(If there's been polls, sorry, I don't normally go looking so I didn't know)