tinysalamander

Which makes no difference for “per-encounter” classes.

If penalties will be too bothersome main hero will likely become some sort of defensive bard who doesn't need to do anything. If that doesn't work – a liability, who is sent somewhere out of the battle areas.

Boarding the turn-based train.

Why not? Personally, I enjoy reading them.

And dragons.

Say hello to paralysis immunity.

… gap between casters and non-casters increases.

In general, casters want to feel like spellcasters, not poor man's crossbowmen, and you need to recover those slots somehow… It doesn't mean you can't finish the game using Blast with you wizard most of the time aside from boss battles, but it's just not as fun.

IMO, you are unlikely to find a good balancing point for this. If the difference between safe and unsafe options is minimal it does not really matter. If it is a high risk – high reward scenario players will likely use those options if they can ignore or heavily mitigate the penalties (say hello to Suppress Affliction) as odds are against you. Your foes' combat life is 1 encounter so it doesn't matter that much if enemy caster is paralyzed/loses all endurance/drops deads. You, however, do not have that luxury as your expected combat life is the whole game, which is quite a number of encounters and you are bound to fail sometime even if the chance is low. If the chance is high and not easily ignorable it promotes save-load behavior. Will not work because someone who wants to rest will. Double time speed and wait. You can push your players only so far before they'll start hating you, and I think this is pushing it into that direction.

Do we seriously need more rests?

Not necessarily, if you can't add Speed enchantment manually. Unique weapons will get unique built-in enchantments, just as it is now. Or, say, some unique weapon can be enchanted with Speed, but most others and all non-uniques cannot. There could be enchantments that are exclusive to player enchantment too.

I'd like more enchantments to apply at the very least. Variety isn't exactly a strong point currently.

Which you'll immediatelly burn on arrival from there because of travel time *cough*

Which means, since the whole game can be soloed on hardest settings, that there are no problems at all, right?

You can choose to not use item enchantments. I can't, however, use an enchantment even if I want to if it's not in the game.

It's like the old “we wish that nobody is poor” vs “we wish that nobody is rich” thing. Guess which side you are on If non-casters are underwhelming they should be fixed, not others brought down to them.

Not that I don't agree that adding is better that removing, but “too balanced to be of any real use,” that's just not what “balanced” means.

Not really. The mess that piles up when you sell items to them, however…

Clearly, they have failed then Although, if the goal was to please both sides of this battle, they did pretty fine.

Exactly like they can do now. EDIT: What I'm saying is just because someone gets less it does not mean you get more.

Which means those who want it now have to spend talents on it, and those who don't got nothing. This fixes… what exactly?

This whole Crägholdt thing was tad more PITA than I expected it to be on Normal. What's player's expected defense values, I wonder. Priests and fire immunities don't mesh quite well %) At least you can still buff. I wished Hope Eternal was some sort of good AoE in that last battle. Or an aura

I need to check weather in Hell, brb.

I had to redownload base game and an expansion fully on Linux (there wasn't a patch for an expansion anyway), as after applying supposed patch game's version didn't change for me…

You just haven't seen bugs in Might & Magic Heroes VII yet *cough*