Taking a step back a moment, I want to be clear. Patch 5 is great. I enjoyed the game SO much more. I'm still not done with it, mind you, but it is so much more enjoyable. I don't feel like I'm bashing my head into the wall during every battle just trying to figure out how to cheese the fight in order to move forward. I felt like I was able to make my way through without getting frustrated. Some fights I did have to reload, but I felt like either that was due to just bad rolling the first go around or I made some stupid mistakes. It wasn't because the game was just too dang hard.
The hag fight, for example, used to piss me off to no end. I loved the concept of it, but the execution was awful. For my first playthrough, the only way I wound up beating her, after like a dozen tries, was that I finally got lucky and shoved her through the hole. I had one character left alive and had a 25% chance of shoving her and succeeded by some miracle. Now, in Patch 5, I had to maybe only play it twice at most, and each time I felt things were going relatively well.
The Gith fight I actually beat on my first try, reloaded it and did it again just to see what would happen. Same result. I won. It was tough, but not like it used to be where in the first round half my party was dead because they Misty Stepped to high ground or backstabbed me to death with two attacks from behind.
So, this said, my issue isn't so much that the game isn't fun. It's just the implementation of the monsters. I get what you're saying about the intellect devourers being weaker because of the crash, and they don't body thief you because of the special tadpole. I figured that was what they were kind of going for. They even have the devourers now with less health, as if they are injured. That's fine too. In fact, I thought having them with half or less health really fit the scene well.
The issue is simply that even at half health, whether newborns or not, they should be resistant to piercing, bludgeoning, etc. But even if you make an exception to this and say that they are all newborns who haven't developed resistance yet, my issue is that ALL of them are then newborns without resistance. Likewise, ALL of the imps you face have no resistance either. Are they ALSO newborn imps who haven't developed resistance? Why do imps not use Sting or Invisibility? Sting would be much more effective than melee or ranged weapons. It is one of their natural abilities, so why wouldn't they use it? Invisibility would make them like phase spiders, assassins who are not able to be seen until they attack you.
These are things that make the monsters what they are. Goblins are not tanky fighters. They are little grunts who are only really effective in large groups. So why use goblins instead of something like orcs, or if you are going to use goblins, why not just send out more of them so players feel like they are having to kill mass numbers of them as the challenge as opposed to only a few tanky ones? I can even accept that these are the Absolute's goblins, so maybe Gut has enhanced them with certain spells. Okay. That's fine. But phase spiders also don't act like phase spiders and wood woads don't really use wood woad stats and mud mephits don't use mud mephit stats, except maybe their ability to generate a few more mud mephits, and even that isn't implemented completely accurately. Then you have gnolls not being true gnolls and minotaurs not being true minotaurs, and so on and so forth.
I can work with one or two variants here or there. I can make excuses for those and accept them. The issue is that ALL the monsters are not using proper stats. ALL of the monsters are altered. Many of them are only what they are in name and skins only. What gives them their true identities has been stripped from them.
The main reason I use the intellect devourers as a prime example is because they don't even ever use devour intellect on anyone. That is their primary ability. That IS what makes them what they are. Devour Intellect and Body Thief are what they are. So, if you're going to use an intellect devour, even 1, let me see them be intellect devourers.
Neverwinter Nights, the original, made perfect use of an intellect devourer. It took over a soldier's mind and had that soldier attack the MC and companion. After that soldier died, it jumped out of him and ran to the next one and took him over. Then you had to fight another grunt soldier and kill him until the intellect devourer had no one left to take over... BUT YOU! But he didn't take you over. That was fine with me. No complaints. In fact, I'm glad they didn't allow it to do such a thing. That would have sucked. So the point is that they at least used its primary ability in some way.
In the same way, they could do something similar in the battle against the MC and Shadowheart. Have a single, or multiple, devourers that are super hurt with only a few HP left fighting some fishermen when you arrive. As you enter the battle, they devour intellect and body thief the fishermen. Then, as the fishermen, they attack you. You have to kill the fishermen and then they pop out. Then you have to finish them off. Maybe they only have like 2-5 HP left after the crash but they have resistance, so you have to still do at least 10 damage or something to finish each of the 3 off. That would be just fine. Something like that would make the scene more true to the creatures and make it so much more emotionally raw. Here are these fishermen who are just victims, but the devourers have taken them over and are using them to kill you. You have no choice but to kill them. Shadowheart could even say something like, "Their minds are gone. Don't hold back. They're already dead," just to appease any guilt you might have.
And, on that note, I would also ask, "If our tadpoles are special to the Mind Flayers and they want us to live, why are they trying to then kill us? If I help kill Zalk and save the Mind Flayer, why does he turn on me and try to then kill me? Shouldn't he, instead, use some sort of ability to take over my mind and MAKE me go to the controls? He's a mind flayer. Why is he not taking over minds especially of our characters? Why kill something so special to him? Why are the devourers even trying to kill us? If they don't Body Thief us because of our special tadpoles, why are they even attacking us? Shouldn't they be like, 'Ah! Master! Let me join you and help you fight anything that's coming to kill you?' Are they confused and disoriented?"
None of it makes sense, and that's where my problem comes in. Maybe it'll make sense later in the game. Whatever. I find it hard to believe that they could really make sense of every single creature being not true to their proper 5e stats and design, but if they can... Great! Fine. But they better have some seriously good reasoning for it. Otherwise, why?
Again, if you need mind flayer grunts, why not use something like Kuo-Toa? If you need goblinoid tanks, why not throw orcs in the mix or hobgoblins? The Absolute obviously has multiple races working for her. Why not more bugbears instead of tanky goblins? Why not some crazy spider variants? Why phase spiders that aren't acting like phase spiders? Why wood woads and mud mephits? Why not something else? Giant frogs? Something that fits more. The list goes on and on.
