- goblins have triple their MM health, loads of alchemists fire. It feels like the DM is cheating for no good reason.
Why can't I have battles like in 5e where 10 goblins rush you, your fighter slashes through 2 and your wizard blasts 3 others. And the difficulty comes from there being many enemies or being surprised.
- surfaces. surfaces everywhere. go away.
I have to say I like the surfaces. Could be a little less common - especially enemies having surface creating bottles / arrows is frustrating.
- the game wastes my time with big 'set piece' battles like the one at the gates of the druid grove. Lots of NPCs fighting lots of NPCs. I can't ambush or anything because a cutscene forces me into combat so far away from the action I spend most moves running. Just use a cutscene, please.
I'm OK with some 'set piece' battles. In fact, having a few large scale battles feels like there's something big happening story-wise. But they shouldn't be very common.
- most fights are so difficult that you need party optimisation, which means you'll need to be a cleric or have shadowheart and that's that.
THIS -- I'm a long-time DM and in D&D you don't re-do battles. You have easy battles, tough battles and then you have boss-level very challenging battles. But - the players need to feel they can find a way to beat it, no matter how unexpectedly they stumble into the fight. Now you may encounter 3 goblins at lvl 4 and have a drop 2 characters. All boss fights you need to first stumble into, then load and find a way to surprise the enemy. Not fun at all.
This was the biggest negative thing in DOS2 as well for me.
In some situations you notice the enemy first and can plan a sneak attack. Most times I would expect fights to start on even ground or anyway the enemy attacking openly or in surprise. The players should feel they are in trouble, but it doesn't mean you die 9 times out of 10 because you were surprised. The players are the heroes! They should be able to overcome without a re-do.
- picking on low-armor backline targets or knocked out ones. Seriously, I get that in real life monsters will probably do this, but in gameplay the reality is people are going to just give up trying to have low armored casters in their party at all.
No matter what you do, Gale goes down. I mean, when the fight breaks, the enemy don't know who you are. Why would they go after the guy farthest back? They don't know he's the easiest to kill or that they should go after that one (unless you meta the AC).
This game has great potential but right now it feels like it is a great adventure in the hands of a shitty neckbeard DM who hates you.
It really does. All the dice roll DC's outside battle. All the fights with overpowered enemies with stacks of HP. Goblins 2-hitting your lvl3 characters. Bosses 1-hitting your AC18 fighter.
If you need to load (even multiple times) for a battle to find the right approach, it's bad game design for an RPG.
