That's my point, Lunar Shower. Ranged characters do okay with the height advantage, but take that away and they're a total shadow of what they ought to be under 5E rules, even without all kinds of shenanigans that one could maybe forgive Larian for not supporting.
Longbows should be able to attack as far away as 180 meters. In the game they have a max range of a tenth of that. A tenth! Given a standard movement speed of 9 meters per turn, you can do the math on the number of attacks a longbow user should get against an enemy approaching on open ground before melee becomes a thing. In this game, however, ranged characters can barely squeeze in an attack before chaff can rush into melee range and mess with attack priorities.
Height advantage does counter-balance the lack of range a fair bit, particularly when you combine with damage boosters like sneak attack or Hunter's Mark or Hex, but it has so much of an effect on encounters that it starts to dominate the meta. Just find a high spot, control access to it, and shoot away. The mill encounter, which is a bit of a pain? Trigger it with Astarion, then dash and cunning dash away back to the village and start killing them from the rooftops.
True enough, it is plenty abusable to say the least, and without it I could definitely see ranged suffering a good bit. Its a pretty delicate balance to say the least though in either direction. Though, will say the windmill is actually a pretty decent example of being an encounter that seems extremely challenging/unfair at first, at least until you realize all you need to really do is focus down the boss of the group, something that isn't really readily apparent unless you have Wyll in your group, and even then its dubious at best. Will admit though, stopping the windmill after sneaking up into it, and just sneak killing everyone that comes to check on it till the group is culled to about 3/4 or 1/2 of what it was to start was both super cheesy, but also pretty amazing as far as moments go in the game for me, and that's just something I managed to luck out and do on my first attempt, and also where I learned just how busted the stealth mechanics can be in this game currently. Fun, but definitely overpowered.
All in all, I'm no game designer, but if they do end up removing the % to hit from height advantage, maybe they could just give ranged a general buff in its length throughout, while also maybe further expanding it up at higher elevations? Its tough to really say what might work best without further tipping things in the direction of ranged once more. Either way, plenty of things to think on, and more to hopefully give Larian a bit of food for thought, though I'm sure much of this is things that have already been on their mind in some form or another. More than anything, I hope they give us custom sliders/options for difficulty similar to Solasta, if there is ONE thing they could take from that games success, it would be that and allowing for a truly custom experience tailored to each player.
