Concordance

Negativity tends to generate more discussion than positivity, and it can lead to change. If you are unhappy with an aspect of the game, you can propose how to improve it, others can discuss your improvements and propose your own - maybe the creators will read your ideas and be inspired to make changes in a patch, or an expansion, or a sequel. You can hope, at least. If someone is happy with the game, then they feel the game is working as intended. Nothing needs to be changed or added, so there's no reason to post. Since there is fairly little developer presence on the forums (outside from bugfixing), it probably doesn't cross people's minds to leave uplifting feedback on things they enjoy. It's worth noting that most of the "complainers" appear to be recurring posters and have sunk 50+ hours into the game on average - they either are emotionally invested in the game, or want to be. If the game was genuinely bad, the forums would be a graveyard - people would drop in to express their disappointment and never come back.

Does it actually need fixing? You only have to use doorways if you have a ranged party with 1-2 tanks. If you've decided to go with a composition of mainly squishy characters, you must use the terrain to limit melee engagement to something your tanks can manage. It's basic tactics, right? If you can't control yourself and must optimize encounters by using doorways, considering building a melee-centric party with no "dedicated" tank, such as Fighter+Barbarian+Monk+Melee Rogue(low con/int, mid might, high int/per/res, stilettos or sabres)+Paladin (must be PC)+Priest(reach or ranged). Don't minmax any of the melee characters except the rogue. You will find that your party has high survivability, lots of per-encounter abilities and surprisingly good damage output. You will have a lot of fun with no need for doorways. Do you have any idea how good it feels to be able to walk into a room full of enemies and start smiting like you own the place?

If you're willing to take mid-dungeon breaks to rest at an inn and restock on camping supplies, you don't need much in ways of weapons, armor or strategy. If you can affort to rest every 1-2 fights, the Wizard can lower resistances on, incapacitate and wipe the floor with roomfulls of pretty much anything.

I doubt there would be any major changes to the spellcasting system. The game has been released for weeks, many people are already deep into their playthroughs and are firmly set in their builds and character composition. You can expect balance tweaks at best. They did try a more "modern" spellcaster design with no daily spells. The result is a class that excels both at crowd control and AoE DPS, and is probably the strongest class overall. If you dislike the daily spell limit, you can play Cipher and witness the full glory of the "be-all end-all Wizard" trope Sawyer tried so hard to avoid.

Hey OP, can you compile the list into a google doc? That would make it easier to read (everything on one place), and you'll be able to update it as you please. You can ask a moderator to add the link to the first post for you. I would do this myself, but I don't wish to hijack your idea and the work you've done so far.

I think it's important to note that Divinity: Original Sin was released relatively bug-free. I sunk 120 hours into the game in the two months from release and cannot recall encountering a single bug. I could, and indeed, have recommended D:OS to friends before they Larian had gotten around to releasing any patches, whereas I am still waiting for 1.04 to restart my PioE playthrough. As one of Larian's founders pointed out during his GDC talk, they've experienced firsthand that a buggy release can seriously hurt sales. Whether PioE's sales are more affected by the state of its release, sparse marketing or complexity/obscurity of its combat mechanics remains to be seen. Here is Larian's GDC talk if anyone is interested: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021934/Divinity-Original-Sin-Postmortem-Success I hope Obsidian will do a postmortem for PioE at some point. It would be interesting to hear their experiences once the post-release stress has cleared.

You might be interested in trying Divinity: Original Sin if you haven't already. It has turn-based combat driven by an action points system, with turn order decided by combatant initiative. It also has a sort of "engagement system" in the form of a talent called Attack of Opportunity, that gives your or enemy party members an out-of-turn melee attack on a character trying to move out of range. Virtually all melee enemies have this talent by default, though the player can get it on his party members as well. However, it does not work for "holding aggro" since enemies often choose to take the disengagement hit if it means they can cleave a squishy character in the same turn.

We're talking about a CRPG with 50+ hours of gameplay and hundreds of pages of script, set in a brand new universe, with mechanics complex enough to warrant heated 10+ page arguments about builds and optimal walkthroughs. I think most people are reasonable enough to recognize that the self-censorship incident, while highly unfortunate, is not nearly enough to condemn such a high-effort and content-rich product. It is also not nearly enough to claim "Obsidian doesn't care about fans", especially after seeing the sheer amount of dev forum posts over the last two weeks (and weekends!) and reading 1.03 patch notes.

IIRC Larian has stated that the sales of Divinity: Original Sin were enough to fund two upcoming games (neither currently announced) without turning to Kickstarter. Hopefully PioE's sales will be able to afford Obsidian the same freedom.

They nerfed the Animat Horn (which had many solo strats relying on a single item) and instead doubled the XP bonus for solo (which opens up many new strats). It looks like good balancing to me.

A single chanter not being able to affect both the enemies and allies sounds like a good thing, honestly. Since chants don't stack, this gives you a legitimate reason to have two chanters in a party.

Actually, by the time Aloth can "catch up" by gaining per-encounter level 1 spells, your Cipher will be clearing entire rooms with Mind Blades I think if you want to experience the most out of the companion dialogue. You will have to dedicate at least two playthroughs where your PC will unambigiously carry the party in damage output. You can partially mitigate that by using 4 companions and creating a custom minmaxed adventurer for better tanking or damage output, if you wish.

6 chanters is effective because the 6 phantoms they summon utterly demolish everything. The problem is that's going to be all your fights in a nutshell - surviving until you can spawn phantoms. Chants don't stack. You will likely be bored to tears and restart before reaching level 5.

I've briefly tried 6 rangers with 6 bears and it looks like a viable Hard difficulty composition. In fact, it might be the perfect composition for the "complete the game with only 4 rests" achievement. Since the bears have no transient Health and your Rangers will rarely if ever get hit, you don't need to rest nearly as much as with a regular party. Bears, like all animal companions, are weak individually, but they work fairly well as offtanks - when there's 6 of them, you can spread the engagements around. The 6 rangers can focus fire anything that slips through the bears or anything capable of killing bears too quickly. While a bear getting knocked out incurs a huge accuracy penalty on the ranger (20 I think?), it doesn't hurt that much when you have 5 more. In most cases you'll be using bears as meat doors in chokepoints, anyway. A 6 ranger party might have severe problems in encounters where the enemies can't be bodyblocked and/or deal high burst damage. You can't really boost your bears all that much. I have not gotten that far yet, though - currently suspended my playthroughs until the nasty bugs get squashed. If you don't care about a point of "evil" reputation at the beginning, you can slaughter the caravan yourself (beware, Calisca will turn on you). If you sell all the loot from the caravan and the pistol from the tent, you will have just enough money to hire 5 adventurers straight after Cilant Lis.

I wonder how much the stat increase bugs are responsible for the numerous "Hard mode is too easy" posts that have been popping up up both on this forum and the PioE subreddit. It would not be implausible that the authors of these posts were using default companions with massively inflated stats and did not even notice. I imagine one's perception of difficulty might get skewed by Eder tanking 4+ enemies at a time without taking a single hit across the encounter.

Personally I imagine that the very poor communication they are displaying is due to the fact they probably have had quite a lot of sleepless nights at Obsidian since the release. I get the feeling they have been taken a bit by surprise of how very, very buggy this release ended up being. I suspect the game needs more than just one quick patch release to become as stable as most of us would want the game to be. We'll just have to be patient. I think this is highly likely to be the cause. In my experience, the weeks following up to release of software products (games included) tend to involve a lot of programmer and tester overtime. Take the crunch time before going gold, add the work they spent releasing 2(?) patches between PioE going Gold and release, throw in the overtime incurred this weekend and wrap all of that in stress incurred knowing that you have unfixed bugs causing players to throw away 10+ hours of gametime - this sounds like a recipe for some extreme programmer burnout.