It's a normal difficulty meant for hordes of people who never touched D&D ever or since 2e at best and want just to gather a party of characters they like, roll a main character they like and quest with them without having to optimize every bloody ounce of their game.
People here totally enjoy smelling their farts it seems. "Just optimize everything lol, how do you not know these things sheesh it's a common knowledge - they teach it in schools. Just use ur brain and figure out whole 5e D&D system with your brain power!"
Keep this nonsense to Tactician difficulty. Normal difficulty should be accessible without mandating optimization at cost of story.
Nobody is saying "optimize everything, min-max everything, powergame using guides etc.".
People aren't that stupid. Anyone should be able to understand that some encounters require you to adapt and figure out a way to defeat the opposition. If someone wants to play a game where they can just ignore every single mechanic of the game and still plow through everything I don't believe they should be playing a game based on D&D. And please note that I'm not being dismissive of people who want an easier time at the game. That's why different difficulties exist and they should tune them to whichever experience they prefer. What you're saying however is something along the lines of the player finding an enemy which is immune to physical damage let's say, attempt to bash it with a hammer 20 times (having a little *IMMUNE* text popup everytime they do it), start foaming at the mouth because he can't possibly understand what he must be doing wrong, so well I guess Larian is just going to have to make that enemy vulnerable to physical damage now. It doesn't make sense.
Not only does it not make sense to start changing monster attributes and characteristics as it also effectively breaks other functionalities. Some examples were already given here such as the sleep or bless spell. Then for each thing you break, you need to find a workaround to balance it. But then the workaround will break something else... You get the idea.
And since you're touching the difficulty aspect, I still believe that even the lowest difficulties should keep the lore and monster characteristics so that the experience of playing a D&D game and exploring a forgotten realms setting remains. Have it be easier to hit enemies, make your characters take less damage, etc... Things that can smooth the difficulty of the game but without breaking its core mechanics.
