In DoS2 the further in the game, the easier it gets.
The fight with Alexander is literally the most difficult moment of the game and if you complete it, nothing will ever come close to it.
I was talking about balance, not so much about difficulty. It's important to understand the difference.
Alexander was definitely the hardest fight in the game, but for very fair reasons. The environment gives a lot of room to plan out your defensive tactics, Alexander himself isn't capable of massively bursting down your party, and the party usually doesn't have the power to do the same to him yet either. The real boss that shows up mid-fight throws a wrench in everything, but it forces you to adapt to the fight in a new way that later fights absolutely don't capture at all.
Literally every boss fight after that point immediately devolves to into said fights more or less being resolved within the first 3 turns, due to environmental design not really allowing you to play defensively, and bosses suddenly having ridiculous abilities capable of one-rounding most of your party members. Maybe it's a response to how the power of player characters exploded with the new abilities gained in act 2 too, but who knows.
- Mordus? Kill him first, or he'll source drain whoever else dies first and transform into his super mode. You're not beating his super mode without casualties unless you're overleveled for the fight. Oh, and the arena is mostly flat.
- Alice Aliceson? Split up your whole party before even talking to her, or else you're going to get party wiped immediately before you can even react. Oh, the arena here is mostly flat too unless you had the foresight to split up your party and put your ranged on the nearby walls - which a normal player will absolutely not do the first time around.
- Eternal Alterna? Better hope you have a plan to burst her down immediately, because she has absurd action economy along with specializing in ice/lightning magic to freeze/stunlock your party. I do not imagine most people defeating her on a first try, though I somehow managed that only because I had Fane put Time Warp on my archer (which allowed him to recover from being frozen early, due to the time warp eating that frozen turn), and he had enough damage to burst her down in one round due to the absurdity of ballistic shot punishing her hardcore for teleporting so far away from the party. Of course the obvious solution is to split everyone up, though there are also the wolves to be concerned about too. Oh yeah, sort of a flat arena too, though there are walls/gaps in the flooring.
And that's just the biggest offenders in act 2.
Ignoring 5e entirely... The current reaction system is just flat out bad. Consuming very limited resources on a random automatic target isn't anyone's idea of good game design.
This is more or less the gist of my grievances. I only use 5E as a reference because that's how it exists there. If Larian could come up with something better than how reactions are implemented in 5E, more power to them. But the current implementation is just bad and is going to lead to a lot of problems later. It's already another factor pushing encounter design towards prescience, which I consider to be in the realm of fake difficulty.
