This thread suffers from using terms that are ill defined. Everything in this game is easy when you know exactly what to do and ranges from difficult to impossible if you don't.
I prefer to think of combat in this game as a sequence of puzzles to be solved by the player. On my first blind playthrough (tactician), I stumble into fights without the benefit of hindsight, so I first needed to discover the rules. I often discover game rules by failing. Failure is an amazing tool for discovering how things work.
Once I know roughly what skills/abilities are effective, what skills/abilities the enemies use and how the AI uses them, I try to identify potential win conditions. It doesn't matter if I fail because I am eliminating methods that don't work.
Then comes executing a win condition. For example, the first time I ran into Alice Alisceon, I got owned repeatedly. After numerous failed attempts I came to the conclusion that in order to win, she had to be separated from her healing totems and she could not be allowed to attack. I was level 10 or 11 the first time I did the fight so she blew up my entire party in a single turn.
The first time I beat her, I settled on a strategy of moving 3 characters up to the abbey, pre-emptively casting Living on the Edge on an unchained character, initiating dialogue/combat on this character and forcing Alice to waste her first turn on a target that couldn't be killed. Then I teleported her up to the abbey, shredded physical armour, and chained physical cc (battlestomp, battering ram and chicken).
A "difficult" fight to me is one that has very strict win conditions. If you know what to do, its still "easy" but at this point you have the benefit of hindsight, build theorycrafting and repeatable/predictable results in testing. I expect it to be easy to execute a strategy that I have pre-prepared and already know will be successful.
I think the "difficulty" of Tactician/Honour is fine in a broad sense. You can plan a consistent route through each act in order to match or overrun the hp and damage scaling of enemies at each level. The game subtly corrals you into fighting within +/- 2 levels of your enemies.
If you do things out of sequence, then you can run into fights very under-leveled, get out scaled hard and the win conditions become super strict like fighting Alice at level 10, where you cannot engage her where she spawns and you cannot allow her to attack.
Later in the game the opposite problem emerges where it becomes easy to out scale and over-level enemy encounters. The win conditions become very relaxed. Many strategies will be successful and you can execute them all poorly but still win. There are less consequences or no consequences for allowing enemies to hurt you.
We know Larian is addressing the scaling issue. For me, Act 1 is fine the way it is and is a good template for the other acts to follow. I think the fights can be approached in a mostly linear fashion with increasingly stricter win conditions the nearer you get to the end of the act. The one outlier for me was Radeka, who I thought required the most elaborate setup to beat. Fights are designed to be tackled +/- 1 level.
The scaling issue begins around level 9 (act 2, zone 2) due to the vitality leap growth levels at 9, 13, 16 and 18. There is a mod to reduce the stat growth rate (both constant growth and leap growth) but you will note that it only reduces vitality scaling and all item defence and damage values are calculated automatically based off vitality using ratios (which can be edited).
When people talking about making the game "more difficult" by imposing arbitrarily stricter win conditions, they invariably involve falling behind the vitality scaling curve. One such example would be to self impose a "no thievery" rule. One consequence of this is you can no longer upgrade all your gear at vitality leap growth levels by shopping stat upgrades for free, which will put you massively behind on the damage scaling curve.
I don't think arguing about difficulty is productive. The game is as easy or as difficult as your knowledge of how the game works on a mechanical level. What I'm really looking forward to in Definitive Edition is re-thinking my assumptions about how Classic Edition works. Hopefully I will have a new set of puzzles to figure out. I am under no illusion that the game will be easy once I figure out all the puzzles and that's ok.
Last edited by Hayte; 31/08/18 02:24 PM.
