Originally Posted by Saito Hikari
Going through this blind on Tactician and having just reached act 3, I think most of this is really just a 5E balancing thing + some gear and class features being really REALLY busted more than anything else. But more 5E - even Solasta was also consistently in joke tier difficulty unless you played on the hardest difficulty there, which apparently doubled enemy stats (and gave them extra damage die from what I hear).

I think one of the major issues is that there aren't actually that many spellcasters or enemies using any actual threatening special abilities once you leave act 1. It felt like there were way more varied encounters in act 1. For all the crap we put this forum through pre-release arguing for a proper reaction system, I haven't even found that much reason to use counterspell or even have Gale use Shield at all because there were so few spellcasters with actual threatening spells or anyone actually targeting Gale.

I don't think it's a 5e thing.

One thing we should keep in mind is that almost any adaptation of DnD has problems with difficulty unless they fudge the numbers a bit. Remember that in tabletop, things are balanced around the idea that everyone can choose their own character class, and a party wipe really IS a party wipe - that's it - adventure over. It's akin to saying that in a computer setting, you don't get full control over party composition and you should be expected to win every encounter on the first try, no reloading.

Of course in a computer setting, you have full control over party composition, perfect control over all your characters, can reload every time, and what's more, you (especially after the first playthrough) go into every fight KNOWING what it's going to be like. These combine into huge advantages that inherently make cRPGs less difficult than tabletop. So even faithful adaptations of ANY DnD edition are going to have some problems with the difficulty and find some need to buff monster hp and stats compared to TT if they want to make things more difficult.

I don't think 5e should be blamed for conversion problems that are common to every edition, and I don't think Larian should be blamed for struggles that every TT-to-cRPG adaptation has encountered. What Larian CAN be blamed for is for making the problem worse (much worse imo) due to some of their homebrew implementation rules and the items they hand out.