Kingmaker and WotR are super fun and well balanced... On normal. I have had no issues whatsoever on that setting.
So even though it says Challenging dif is normal damage done to my characters, the game isn't balanced for those harder levels. It is meant for those who either super know the game, or they are just crazy,. So I don't think Owlcat sucks at encounter design. I just think they balanced it for the 20% damage reduction setting instead of 0%. Maybe they did this to have more enemies, or tougher monsters, in combat.
But then, isn't that what Larian is doing? Intellect Devourers and imps are WAY too tough for level 1. So, they nerfed um.
Seems like they're doing the same thing to me. Nerfed enemies on Normal. If they implement 5e, enemies would become way too tough.
Pathfinder is not balanced on normal it's just that terribly easy and if you have any experience with the 3e you'll hardly ever have any problems. Unless we are talking about players who intentionally mutilate their characters, e.g. with +1 +2 on their main stats, but this is quite an extreme case. The higher difficulty levels show how good the fights design is. In the case of DOS2, even at the highest level, the fights were fairly well-balanced and you didn't feel that the game was constantly cheating. Of course, a lot of the fights were deadly, but at the same time dealing with the death of a character was relatively easy. More importantly, there was no random attack ending the game because it hit the main character. For some reason, Owlcat won't let you revive your main character if they die in combat, even though there are spells that can revive your characters if they died within two turns and they are available quite early.
