Honestly, the stream didn't give me much faith on this topic. Larian doesn't seem to be interested in making any changes to rein in things like jump/disengage and high ground advantage/low ground disadvantage along with the lack of defensive proactive options like ready actions and dodge, judging from the idea that they just completely dodged literally any mention of these. This, despite the community giving them about 2 months worth of focused feedback since the last patch. They were more interested in showing off the flash rather than going into a deep dive on the mechanics and showing that they actually understood how everything they were creating worked and interacted with each other.
Watching the hag fight go sideways in the stream was rather entertaining, and some would say it's rather endearing to see 'realistic' gameplay. At the same time, it also gives off the impression that they don't really know how to balance things, because their core design philosophy has always been about letting players experiment and figure it out for themselves, with one of the lead directors themselves forgetting things mid-fight. But at some point, the sandbox 'cobble everything together enough to have a working combat system and then let players figure everything out for themselves, and hopefully enable out of the box strategies' philosophy basically just becomes a shield to deflect criticism, as one can see from a portion of the community just deflecting any and all criticism on this topic without the introspection needed to see that the game CAN be better if the design were to be a bit more focused. As it is now, the combat just looks like a lot of disconnected ideas coming together to form quite a mess, hence one of my earlier comments basically considering the game's combat to be akin to a puzzle game that just happens to have RPG mechanics, rather than an actual strategic RPG in its current state.
+1 to this sentiment. tbh i was really disappointed in the panel content - i know we got some speakers and that some ppl enjoyed watching swen 'play' the game, but i would have preferred more discussion addressing the hot topics cited in these forums and in other community spaces instead of hearing swen blaming the 'loaded dice' for not being able to game the hag encounter with the shapeshifted druid or gales flaming sphere. and did anyone else know that you could heal someone by throwing a potion at them? lol wut?
