[quote=Grimo]
- So much criticism was leveled against Larian for the lighthearted goofiness of their earlier games. Now everyone is a ‘meany’. They can’t win.
Hah I remember that. They did tone down the worst of the DoS 1 goofiness for DoS 2, and here they're going for a mostly straight-ahead D&D theme. The current companions aren't likeable on the surface, but we haven't seen all of them yet or their later development in the game. So I'm not gonna pass judgement on that yet.
On some of the other OP points: Goblins having too-high HP is probably a result of Larian deciding the maximum enemy group size the game engine and camera view could support, and then working backwards from there to balance each combat encounter. We get high HP goblins because the game engine probably can't support throwing a horde of lower-HP goblins at the player party.
The current ruleset lets anyone heal, just not always at a distance, so it doesn't really force choosing a Cleric.
Big battles take a while, partly due to AI processing and that may be optimized before final release. The game allows Save in the middle of combat, which surprised me, but makes the larger battles more manageable because I can stop and come back later.
