I want the goblin battle to feel different than other battles. Right now, they don't feel much different than the gnolls or the folks raiding the tomb near the beginning. The thing about goblins is that they are individually pretty weak, but they have numbers. So make them very weak - give them low HP so you can one-shot them and give them plinky little damage, but have there be a ton of them. Give the elite goblins better armor and weapons if you want, but the goblins should have a fighting style that feels different from fighting anything else - in this case, they should swarm and overwhelm and it's no big deal if you take out a couple of them right away because there are tons of them.
This encourages the player to go for different tactics than in e.g. an ogre/minotaur fight. You want attacks that impact lots of enemies at once. Encourage players to explore all of the tools, not just find one that works and flog it.
The only problem with that, is if the player has a machine that can handle all those added enemies. A lot of players do not have top of the line graphcs cards or processors. If you change the goblins by doubling or tripling their number, and reducing their health and damage, it would be more strain on the players graphics cards and may cause crashes or even buggier game play. I think that is basically why they made those minor adjustments, of a smaller number of goblins, with slightly bloated HP and slightly higher damage.
Personally, I really had no issue with the goblins HP or anything, also I have not played since patch 4, so not sure how much they modified HP bloat with that.
