As for the resurrection scrolls... These are also the first items I sell in BG 3, if you do not need them for certain quests. Reloading and Withers make them largely obsolete anyway.
Well, the big part of their uselessness is the current difficulty of the game. We now know that more challenging ones are coming and those can drastically increase their value. BTW, I didn't quite catch your drift - do you think the abundance of the item is good or bad in the environment where you never use it?
You've already answered your own question and I agree with that:
[...] For example, Withers could just become a resurrection scroll merchant only, while the cost of such scrolls can be increased tenfold and their presence in the world cut [...] TLDR, what I'm saying is:
- Between the plethora of resurrection reels, Withers, and infinite pauses, there is no challenge[...]
However, since this is currently not the case, the scrolls for resurrection are superfluous. Also, the scrolls can never be used in combat, or can they? Anyway, I haven't tried it in TBM yet, is it worth reviving with 1 HP? With only four characters, there is an extremely high chance that two characters will be busy with resurrect and heal actions. Depending on the turn order, the opponent may still bludgeon or shoot your character again. A waste of actions. Two attacks would then have been the better defense to take out the opponent. This would mean using resurrection outside of frequent combat. After a fight, though, you might as well switch to camp to use Withers or, if you're not satisfied, just reload a save game.
- the universal availability to skills like SWTD and Guidance hurts exploration, story and and replayability
Here I argue exactly the other way around. I'm stranded somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with corpses all around me. I don't know what happened and have a thousand questions. If I have the option to question dead people as early as possible in the game to get my bearings and find clues as to what's going on, that's good. If I have this possibility only from e. g. Act 2 it bothers me and I think to myself all the time, why was there not the possibility from the very beginning (3rd level spell). In BG 1 there was also the Ring of Wizardry near the Friendly Arm Inn. Why? Probably to support low level characters with spell slots. In BG 2, the Ring of Wizardry was found much later, because it was no longer necessary to support low level characters early with items.
Why they don't replace the Amulet of the Lost Voices with the scrolls might be due to the not too long duration? You end up finding a lot of corpses and for immersion I use it on each one too and not just the highlighted ones because I believe this is Larian home brew and not part of the original spell... So I would need dozens of scrolls because I shouldn't know when and where I'll meet the next corpse either. At least that's how it should be. The highlighting of corpses for Speak with Dead should be removed again. It's not very exploratory at the moment.
