I'm sure this has been brought up before, but I'm new to the forums and there are 1000's of pages of prior threads. If there is a dedicated thread for posts like this, someone please link me to the discussion. Thanks!
Speaking as a casual video gamer and hard-core D&D player, this game has too many "overpowered" encounters, and it kills the fun of the game. Most of the encounters in the surface world are fine; challenging at times, but survivable. The Githyanki, however... I'm on my 4th playthrough of the surface world, and I don't even bother to visit them anymore, because by the time my first character gets an action, half my party is dead. The Underdark is where the game gets completely stupid, though. Observe:
1) The encounter with the Duergar is unavoidable, and each member of the Duergar team is more than a match for any PC. They automatically start with surprise, get high ground, and they summon help, AND they routinely violate the 5E rules in ways that make them WAY more powerful (Multi-shot with a crossbow? Exploding arrows at level 4? Infinite uses of Mirror Image?).
2) I've had to face the Minotaurs AND the Bulette, together. When I did, all the mobs completely ignored each other. A Bulette's mean damage on a bite is 30 hp, which is more health than anyone other than Lae'zel has. It bites AFTER using Deadly Leap, so whomever it targets is instantly downed. The Minotaurs somehow get to use Gore and then Multi-attack afterwards (when they don't even have multi-attack as an option).
3) The Spectator should be a CR3 monster (and therefore fairly easy for a L4 party to deal with.) Instead, it has twice as many HP as it should, extra eye rays, more actions than it should (4 eye rays a turn? Really?) and it can summon helpers, each of which is equivalent to a PC...except they get to cheat as well (again, crossbows SHOULD NOT have multi-shot).
I'm sure it gets worse as you get deeper into the Underdark, but I wouldn't know, because by the time I've suffered through all of this, I always delete my save and wait for the next patch to start a new run with a different class/race combo...
As I've read through the forums today, I've seen a lot of people expressing the idea that Larian has no intention of making a "D&D" video game; they're just re-skinning DOS II with Forgotten Realms in order to take advantage of the massive built-in player base from D&D. Honestly, if I had realized that Larian was the same studio behind DOS I wouldn't have spent the money on this game. I loved the original BG games, the Neverwinter Nights series, and especially Icewind Dale. I hated DOS with a passion, for the same reasons listed above (I lasted 16 hours before I deleted the game from my library). Since there's little chance that Larian will give me back the $60 I payed to be a unpaid play-tester for their game, all I can do is everything in my power to get them to change course. I'm sure I speak for MANY people when I say that the only reason I bought this game was to be able to play solo D&D in-between RL D&D sessions. You advertised this as a D&D game; please stay true to your word. TSR and WoTC have already spent 40+ years on the game balance and world-building, all you need to do is write the code to bring it to life. The people who want to play DOS III can just go replay DOS II. All of us who want a REAL D&D experience will thank you endlessly for scratching an itch that has been festering for a decade.
Thank you for reading all the way through this.
Ibrahim
