I’ll admit that I wondered why 1varangian did this to themself, too! I agree that stealth in combat, and particularly its use for surprise/ambush attacks is awful. But what I usually do rather than use it and infuriate myself is stay unhidden and only attack once my party is in normal range, and use hide in combat only for characters I’d expect to be sneaky, which puts me at a disadvantage but is more fun than exploiting mechanics I feel are broken. I desperately hope Larian will fix stealth in the full release so I can enjoy using it as I should be able to, but in the meantime believe it is perfectly possible to have fun playing the game by avoiding dodgy mechanics as far as possible. (And of course, if that’s what floats your boat, to also have fun exploiting the potential for cheese as hard as you can.)
Even with the full release, while I hope Larian will fix things like stealth and the ability to cast two levelled spells in a turn with actions at least (and ideally prevent two quickened spells exploiting bonus actions too), I’m not expecting the game to close off absolutely every avenue that I’d consider cheesing. I think it’s quite right that it prioritises flexibility, and am perfectly happy to act as my own DM on some points and decide that there are some things that the game mechanically lets me do that are ruled out for my own particular games, or are ruled out except in specific situations.
I just keep my fingers crossed that some of the worst examples that impinge even if I don’t want to engage with them are fixed, but if the levelled spell issue that is the real topic of this thread isn’t, I’ll just have to decide when I play whether or not to ban myself from leveraging it.
