Playing a multiplayer session with 3 friends of mine and everyone is extremely disappointed with "Tactitian" difficulty of the game. The game feels very easy, with no decision making , no resource managment, every fight is completed in 1-2 turns. And here is what's wrong with the difficulty:
1)Overlevel issue. 1 act is not balanced for characters above level 4 but if you complete all the side quests ( and 99% of the people do complete side quests) you get level 6. In dnd system 1 lvl difference is crazy and literally every encounter after you hit lvl 5 becomes a joke. Then the "overlevel" issue snowballs the game. Lvl 7 when you get to act 2, Lvl 10 before you fight Ketherik . This is super poorly designed, the enemies should either be much higher level or exp given should be reduced. This "overlevel" issue ruins all the fun and fights feels like a routine to kill all the enemies in 1 turn. Also enemies on tactitian should have much more hp but this has nothing to do with overlevel issue.
2)Dumbest AI imaginable. I have never seen an AI dumber than here. Here is the list of my favourite "Very strong AI" techniques:
a)throw alchemists's fire or any grenade at yourself;
b)press dash run 100 ft and then use misty step to go back to exact location you started your turn;
c)use hunter's mark on a target and hit a different target;
d)attack enemies(players) whith resists when you can literally move 1 ft to attack an enemy without them;
e)spend your whole action to cast lay on hands when you can literally attack 2 times with smite and probably kill someone;
And i am not even talking about their poor variety of attacks.No variety in spells, arrows and etc. Feels really bad.
3)Long rest issue. In this game there is no penalty for long rests. That means there is not resource managment. You can literally spam rage on berserk every fight, spam all your spells, it doesn't matter. In act 1 we found around 5000 food. 1 long rest requires 80 food. That means we can longer 63 times during act 1. How is this not balanced in any way? What would make a game much harder and interesting is the resource managment , long rests should inflict some penalties or be restriced to certain amounts. What we have now is a total mess.
4)Absolutely broken consumables. First of, why do elixirs last until long rest. I can literally pop giant elixir and not make long rest until the next act. Elixirs that last until long rest should be balanced. Potion of speed is also very unbalanced. It shouldn't give a spell classes second spell to cast, it should not give 2 more attacks, it should not exist at all. The nice way to balance is to make it last for 1 turn , no need to explain why here.
5)Broken stealth(as always), summons and other spells. I want to start with summons here. Why do summons not require concentration?Them not requiring concentration makes it no brainer S tier spell and you always use it after long rest and they last until... LONG REST. Like serioulsy who made this . Summons are very strong in this game and having them last until long rest with no concentration makes it very stupid. And on top of that you can have multiple of them. This should be balanced for sure .
Stealth. Stealth was dead broken is DOS 1 , DOS 2 , here it becomes even worse. Rogue with stealth exprertise can never be found. Enemies are too dumb , they can't make a check , they can't do anything. They just run around the rogue to fail 500 checks.The only result then need to pass the check is... 20.Critical.Probably they have disadvantage also , i am not sure, i wasn't the one playing rogue. But after a fight where he solo killed the whole Baltazar encounter to showcase how broken stealth is in this game, we asked him to respec). His favourite class is a rogue and he can't play it because the stealth in this game is broken and undeveloped. Huge disappointment here.
There are also a lot of broken stuff like haste which shouldn't work as it does right now, tavern brawler which allows to you hit enemies with 95% accuracy , sharshooter which works with both 1h crossbows and etc.
6)Enemie fall damage. Don't get me wrong here , it's really fun to push and enemy off a cliff . But it's only fun when it's actually hard to do it or when it's a rare opportunity. Here we have abysses in every encounter , pushing enemies becomes a routine, eldritch blast is broken since it can push multiple enemies from distance without any checks. And they just die , instantly. Same with bosses. It's just too annoying that you can complete 90% of the game by pushing enemies to death.
7)Legendary stuff, mostly weapons. They are very cool, we love them. But the problem is that the game is not balanced around them at all, which is very sad. That means to have some sort of smooth experience you can't use them at all because fights become very easy(they are very easy already, but with them it's beyond easy). Either nerf them on tactitian on balance the game around them.
All in all, that's about it. I probably missed something but it doesn't matter. The thing is : tactitian should be actually tactitian , it should bring challenge, decision making , resource management. It bring none of these things. It's a huge disappointment because the game is very good , the turn-based system is our favourite , but the game is too easy, feels like it was balanced mostly for new players and for players who have some experience in turn-based rpgs there is no challenge here at all. It's very sad that to play this game with some challenge you need to download mods, like tactitian plus, better AI... In solasta for example there was a huge difficulty setting option. Here we have nothing. Only mods and artificial restrictions, like don't use that, don't take that. Please add an actualy "tactitian" mode to this game. Please.
