There are some enemy spellcasters in Solasta's OC. Enough for me to have the same thoughts about reaction baiting that you describe. Although, you can probably achieve the same effect by having an expendable summon, or your Rogue to run through the enemies with Dodge activated, bleeding them out of their reactions.
Haven't tried the new campaign yet, people are telling weird things about random encounters, like a party level 4 stumbling upon a Green Dragon and some such.
Yeah, you know how the original campaign had random encounters in the earlier areas outright fleeing from you once your level got high enough? None of that appears to exist in Lost Valley due to the more open-ended nature of that campaign. While you still run into stronger enemies the further you get away from the main city in Lost Valley from the looks of it, the more open-ended nature of the campaign (as in, it's possible to reach endgame in some of the factions very early if you super commit to them instead of trying to advance all of them as far as possible first in order to gauge your options) means you can probably run into the harder random encounters a lot earlier than expected.
Especially if you fully side with the Resistance or the People early, since their quest lines quickly take you to the edges of the campaign map where most of the highest level random encounters appear to be.
Honestly, it seems like the intended progression is to progress with the Forge faction first, since they control the vital Scavenger system, it seems almost impossible to get into negative relations with them outside of some VERY specific choices, and that's the only faction you can reach near endgame in without pissing off the other four factions (you only get a reputation drop in another faction towards the very end of that questline from what I've observed). The faction questline is also the longest and there are also a fair amount of sidequests started by NPCs of that faction too (including one that leads to an entire dungeon which none of the other factions point you towards), while the other factions don't really have any sidequests at all.
