Given there was a solid game design answer that listed out how one should plan the frequency of D&D encounters and at what difficulty, simply "making it easier" would be the opposite of a solution to what I'm saying. I'm not saying, "This is too hard I don't want a challenge," (I've beaten all original Phantasy Star games if you want an example of hard RPGs except for the 4th, all of the Dark Souls games, Shinobi on the hardest difficulty, the original Ninja Gaiden, the original Battletoads, the NES TMNT, etc. etc.), I'm saying I want to at points in the game feel like, "Damn, I've gotten so much stronger." Imagine it's like strength training. When I'm training, I'll warm up with lower weights, and I'll say, wow, I've sure gotten stronger. I'll then train at a near maximum weight which is bigger than what I trained before. Then, around the house, I'll have to lift something that a year ago was heavy and now feels like nothing. If you don't get that around the house experience, it just becomes a monotonous grind.
This 100%. Right now, all of the fights feel more or less the same to me. Enemies all seem to have pretty much the same strategies, they all want the same thing (to kill you), are defeated in the same way (kill them), and the fights mostly feel like they are at about the same difficulty level.
Sure, you can create different difficulty settings and tweaks, but that doesn't address any of those issues - it just shifts the difficulty of every fight up or down by some amount. They're still going to feel samey and boring. The suggestion of using a grab-bag of user settings feels like a cop-out. It's saying "We've given up on Larian knowing how to make a good game; we sure hope the end users can figure out how to do it."
