I am more and more convinced that they planned the game with the difficulty curve of act 1.
But someone got kicked out of the company or got sick and they replaced her or him with a game journalist.
I have a few theories about the difficulty:
1. they wanted streamers to shine while they played, and so they made the game relatively easy for that purpose. Streamers feel good playing because they're doing well, looking impressive (on tactician!), and so they keep streaming the game.
2. the early play testers for Act II were better suited for a lower level difficulty.
3. the fella in charge of setting the tactician difficulty either sorely misjudged the mark or erred on the side of caution. relying on too much feedback from folks who should've been giving feedback to a lower level difficulty.
4. it's just tough to get the difficulty right and it's a work-in-progress.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's a combination of all four.
I think it’s because they wanted to cater to the masses and so they added ridiculously dumb things like Withers to allow everyone including companions to respec to totally different classes all the time for no cost.
This way the devs avoided complains like “oh I gimped my build and have to start all over” or “I hate Clerics but I like shadowhearth so why can’t I make her rogue instead of Astarion” etc
So they added withers but by doing so allowed for super OP builds which builds would be totally gimped if you start the game with them but with withers you can start the game with some powerful early game build then completely change your build as you keep leveling and so you end up being OP both in the beginning and in the end.
For example Raphael’s amulet that sets Con to 23 works best when your constitution is set to 8 , but if you do start with 8 CON with the idea to use this amulet in the end, then your entire game would be really really hard until you get the amulet.
But with Withers there is no need to trade off, just start with 14 Con then dump it to 8 when you get the amulet …
Also as fun as multiclassing is, there should still be some limits on the extent of it: like if you chose to be a warlock then whatever you multiclass should never be able to exceed the level of your main class, so if you want to go warlock / paladin, then you should need to have at least 6 levels of warlock in order to have 6 levels of paladin etc.
Most old school all time great games like Diablo 2, Fallout 1-2, BG1-2 didn’t allow respecing all the time and that was part of the charm of the games- having to utilize and work around the streets and weaknesses of your class as well as your companions classes.
With BG 3 there is no such thing as everyone can be everything and at any time.
But again it’s really hard to balance the game this way beucase if you balance it with the idea that Shadowheart will be Tempest/ Sorc in the end, Astarion would be Gloom/ Assasin, Wyll would be paladin/ warlock etc means that new players who just like to play the classes as they are given would be forced to multiclass into specific OP combinations .
And if you balance it with the dies that the origins would only play their base class with no multiclass then people who multiclass/ optimize the builds would just run over the game with no sweat like how it is right now.
Bottom line is that to balance difficulty you either need to balance it with the idea that everyone will respec and optimize to the most powerful combinations and balance around those combinations or balance it with the idea that everyone will play the characters given based on their current class and not allow /limit respecing in general and balance around that.
To me the origins should not be allowed to multiclass at all or respec , and only the main character should be allowed to multiclass and be given exactly one respec shot, at the end of Act 2.
