Dravin84

I agree. I personally find what I call "kick puppy evil" to tend towards the boring and unsatisfying*. Don't get me wrong, some settings fit that type of evil and can be amusing, but what I enjoy most is being able to make rational decisions in furtherance of my character's self interest even if it comes at a cost to others and seeing evil characters do the same. *Disclaimer: If your one true love is kick puppy evil I'm not saying you're wrong to enjoy it so.

Yep. I personally can't get into Skyrim because I have a moderately low tolerance for sandbox game design but my lack of personal enjoyment doesn't make it a bad game. Of course, what would the internet be without people to conflate personal preference with quality, personal dislike with low quality, and implying (or outright stating) they're smarter than average by virtue of their personal preference. It'd be like a spring without the chirping of birds.

That has been my experience. Crowd control with a smattering of nuking for those boss fights or "Oh Crap!" moments works well. If you play it right you've got a group of mewling kittens trying to scratch their way through your tank while your rogue sneak attacks, due to the status effects, them out of existence.

Yep, one can either God Mode things or pump up your characters to the level you need to get by. Individuals who just don't want to deal with combat at all or who are physically unable to play the game are edge cases where the console commands are the simplest solution. I'm not opposed to the idea of a story mode, but rather than waiting to see if Obsidian thinks it's a good idea and implements it (and implements it to the level you desire/need) you can get playing immediately.

I'd be nice. Given it's a design decision (much like only being able to wear two rings) I can live with it even though there have been moments when I wistfully wished it was otherwise.

I agree. Those who enjoy evil, selfish, or more neutral play throughs in games that allow them get used to the idea that they miss out on reward and loot because of the decisions they make. Sadly many a game seems to operate under the principle that the goody goody character gets all the rewards and loot. It's refreshing when a game breaks that trend and it takes a more nuanced approach to role-playing choices.

Speaking for myself, in a single player game it's not about me building a class X and a class Y, fighting them against each other and expecting each to win 50% of the time, it's about the choices being valid. This goes beyond just paper balance of the classes, but the way encounters and the game is designed. The following examples and discussions are speaking of a generic case to help explain what I'm trying to get it, and are not a specific critic of PoE. Take something like backstabbing, if I want to build a character for that moment of awesome backstab I want it to pay off if the game is letting me build that character. If the class design makes backstab underwhelming, the underlying mechanics make it almost possible to use, or 95% of the game's enemies are immune to backstab then I feel like I've been the victim of a bait and switch (talking about what the game was offering, not that I was monetarily cheated by the game designers). It's a very subjective thing to balance consider you can take something like backstab which tends towards moment of awesome reward and make it feel as valid as a sword and board's high defense and slow and steady damage. It's gotta be difficult to make both choices feel valid when they pay off in very different ways. You even get the difficulty the getting disparate paths paying off within a single class such as a control wizard versus a nuker wizard. Now issues of validity can be related to, and exacerbated by, issues of difficulty but aren't always the same. If it's more difficult to successfully make a backstabbing rogue pay off that's fine, it just needs to be counterbalanced by a more rewarding payoff (be it mechanical, thematic, role-playing, or so on) versus a choice that has a lower but more consistent payoff.