Personally I found Tactician to be ridiculously easy, and I haven't even tried a lone wolf or all physical build.
I'd love to see a level 11 or 12 party walk up to the Scarecrow encounter, go through the dialogue, then beat the encounter on their first run through of the game in Tactician. After I beat it I even went and watched how someone else did it and he did the same thing. Had his heroes all set up on the hill but he didn't teleport the leader down to the town like I did so I had an even easier time than him.
That's my point in all of this. It's not that I can't do it. It's just that it takes completely unrealistically stupid tactics you'd never actually use. And once the fight is over you get next to nothing for a reward.
I do agree equipment should come from fights and such rather than shopping, but I definitely don't agree that enemies should follow the same "rules" as a player in regards to equipment - What happens when you're fighting a non-humanoid enemy that doesn't wear armor? E.G. a demon? Should they have 0 Magic/Physical? Or the scarecrows? Should they drop their straw?
I think that's pretty simple man. You take your average tank class in full str based armor of that level, and that should be the 'average armor for str' for a character of that level. Shouldn't be hard to calculate.
So str based armor at level 12:
Chest: 91/16
Glove: 52/11
Boot: 52/11
Leg: 53/10
Helm: 46/8
So that's 294 armor, 56 magic armor and close to 400 vitality with 10 con. (add in a couple rings and maybe get to 200 magic armor). Go up to maybe 550 vitality with 15 con.
There's your default stats for an average level 12 'heavy str based armor' character.
So on classic mode you fight a level 12 magister, he has 300 armor, 200 magic armor and 500 vitality. When he dies he drops a bunch of white armor and gear which reflects those stats.
Maybe you meet a special Magister who has 400 armor, 300 magic armor and 600 vitality! Well if you kill HIM, he should drop some gear with bonus armor runes, bonus health rings etc.. the GEAR reflects the STATS.
If you simply wanted it to be 'challenging' then just don't loot em. Leave it there and pretend you're good at the game cause you have to go steal 4000 gold from all the villagers to afford any new gear.
When I play DOS2, I play it for the challenge. If enemies have the same stats as my own characters, then the game would certainly be far too easy.
I play games for a challenge too which is why I usually play them on hard or very hard. Nier Automata was great on hard but sadly will never beat it on the PC on very hard because of a terrible port to PC.
Once again there's no challenge in these fights when first turn they teleport into you and one shot you on the first turn. That's not a challenge, that's complete faulty and failed game design.
For the record, again, enemies on Tactician only have 50% more health/armor over classic. So if enemies have double your armor and triple your damage, if you take away 50% of that it should be ~40% more armor and double your damage. But that, according to your own words, is too easy. And you think it should be lowered further?
I don't think the math fits at all here. The enemy armor isn't 50% higher than 'my armor' it's probably 50% higher than 'what a character in full legendary gear would have if he had a full set of legendary gear at his current level'. And with the absolutely pitifully low rewards you get for the fights that's pretty much nearly impossible to attain.
And every time I level I don't magically instantly gain a full new set of gear one level higher. Hell I feel lucky to be able to even find/afford like 8 or 9 pieces of gear in total for my whole party every level. So every level I upgrade about 2 pieces of gear per character... sounds about right.
And as far as loot goes - why would you give people better loot for wanting a challenge? Doesn't that just make the game easier, mitigating the challenge, and thus we're right back at the same difficulty as classic mode just with higher numbers across the board for both enemies and your characters?
Read my above statement.
Also if you are playing against tougher enemies they should be tougher for a reason. Magisters are wearing better gear, giving them bloated stats, making them harder to kill, yielding better gear when you kill them.
Sounds like a damn hell of a fun game to me. Not killing those 4 Magisters and the dog at the gate in Fort Joy to get like 50 gold, a knockdown arrow and some magisters garbage bow. I mean give me a break.
I think the biggest thing you are missing about this game is that it isn't Diablo. This isn't mash buttons, do trillions of damage, get no loot, move to next pack of mobs.
This is supposed to be a visualized D&D campaign. As realistic as you can possibly get without going too crazy. And it's 100% unrealistic to be killing guys who were all wielding bows, swords, shields, armor and drop NOTHING on death. That wouldn't even be that hard to program up.
Each fight should have some kind of meaning to it, a challenge to it, and more importantly a reward at the end. And it's missing the last point immensely.
Keep in mind Tactician isn't even the last difficulty. This is supposed to be like 'Hard' mode, not 'VERY HARD STUPID ENEMIES PWNZ UR NOOBTARD ARSE' mode. It's supposed to be challenging and difficult, but beatable without having to use cheese tactics and abuse bad AI.
I'll say it again. Classic is too easy with little difficulty, Tactician is ungodly annoyingly hard to beat but still doable.. if you know the fight beforehand and abuse cheap tactics. Something in between would be a lot more fun for Tactician. Leave the super godly powered scarecrows that punch you for 900 damage in one round for the looney toons that want to do that on Honour mode.
