It's like Larian decided to give enemies a cheat code where they have infinite AP and no cooldowns on any abilities.
The Kraken summons multiple enemies with 10,000+ Armor and 10,000+ health who can move across the entire map and attack 2-3 times in a single turn? The Sallow Man can stack the same debuff on you for a -9 Constitution penalty? Kemm can kill anyone in two hits with Overpower. Braccus Rex teleports, casts Meteor Shower, and then casts Cursed Fireball. If you're not dead by then the Kraken and Dallas also spam AoE abilities that cover half the map. There is no gear in the game that lets you survive this shit.
It's bullshit, plain and simple. I was actually looking forward to finishing the game and then starting a new playthrough with different companions and builds but I sure as hell won't be doing that now. I'm just going to watch the ending on Youtube.
Someone needs to write a proper review of DoS2 and point out all the bullshit this game has that all the "professional reviewers" who seemingly only played Act 1 have missed or ignored and given it 9s and 10s.
Hear, hear.
I'm not even at the end of the game yet and I'm about to pack it in. This has gone from literally my favorite game, one I couldn't even wait to get home from work to play, to something I'm forcing myself to make progress in because it's installed on my PC. I can't believe something I enjoyed this much turned to shit this fast.
Every single encounter is so set up in the enemies favor it just isn't fun anymore. The point isn't whether I'm able to beat an encounter, it's whether it's actually fun to play, and it doesn't pass that test when every single fight starts with a giant explosion of Necrofire on top of my clustered party (I don't know how people can even defend this anymore, I tried to believe it was just my imagination but since I've been tracking, the last 8 encounters in a row!!!! have all had cursed fire, I am not exaggerating even slightly) and usually on the first enemy turn. I spend my first turn trying to repair the damage and spread my party out (if I didn't reload a save and meta game by moving my toons all over the map, yeah that's great design
it's just like tabletop gaming, remember when your DM lets you take back your moves, position your party favorably and get a mulligan in combat? FUCK NO, me neither) and they spend their next several turns source vamping me (the Dreamer encounter with Malady, Alexander and Windego stole all 12 source points from my entire party before I could use them because I was spending all my AP trying to get to black mirrors while they spent all their AP cheaply cursing, charming, and burning me to death and then just moving me out of the way if I got close to the mirrors), then charming me and popping every expensive potion and burning every scroll I have. Wtf is that? It's not even tactically sound, the enemy just literally takes control of you and wastes your items, it's nonsense.
I know what I'm doing here, my builds are all basically min maxed, everything is focused, no points are being wasted and I have the best loot I can find in every available slot. In Act 3 I literally one-shot Rhalic because I was so overpowered. Act 3 had no challenge whatsoever for me. Now Act IV is so tedious I want to pull my own eyeballs out so I never have to see the word "Fight!" on my screen again. They pretty much ruined this one for me and I'm really disappointed.
The combat system, at heart, is GREAT. Stop "helping" it by giving every enemy 2-3 times as much health, armor and AP as me, always giving them initiative, and just generally using cheap ass cheesy tactics in every single fight.
