Get onto the Solasta forums right now and you will find people discussing how to build characters to replace the thief -- do you build the ranger into the lockpicker / trap disabler or is better to give that to the greenmage? It's a problem I'd rather not deal with. I liked the BG2 party -- lockpicker, meat shield, healer, archer, mage, wildcard.
In a 4 person party I just don't have space for wildcard (sorry bard) and I don't like the building against class strengths -- yeah you can make the bard the trap disabler or have the mage pick locks but that's just not as much fun as having a thief in the party.
+1 to all of this.
I agreed with that as well. While I'd like to play Solasta I'm not real excited about it for a few reasons. 1. The exploration enigma doesn't sound very fun to me. Metroid like puzzle stuff to find your way around the dungeon... Eh. Sounds like a bit of a drag to me, not being a fan of lots of puzzles. 2. Only 4 characters... 3. It also just kinda looked a bit drab.
*Had another 'possibly' great idea for how to do party XP - each battle is just a flat amount predetermined in the game and each character gets that XP (regardless of how many monsters there are or difficulty/toughness). That way, a party of 4 or 6 would always be the same level after X number of battles with the same creatures/fights. More monsters being more challenging for the 6 character party helps to make the fight similar in difficulty as it would be for the 4 char party (but yield the same XP for each char per fight regardless of monster number) and they would get a little more monster loot to help keep those extra 2 characters geared decently. Kind of like if the DM just adjusted XP to be the same for each battle in the game but vary the number of monsters / difficulty of monsters for larger parties. OR if a smaller party wanted a bigger challenge they could go for it and try to fight more monsters, or they could adjust it down to fight less if it was too much. Either way, the party ends up the same level any other party would be throughout the game. Of course alternatively the monsters could just be tougher for larger parties instead of more but I personally think more probably makes a little better sense. The big idea here being that each encounter ends up yielding the same XP per character regardless. Some folks might not like this and want to play 2 characters specifically to level faster, maybe that could be an exception if playing LESS than 4, or they could just make it relatively simple and flat so that characters are a sort of predictable level wherever they have progressed into the game for all party sizes and if players want they can adjust more/less monsters or difficulty.
