Sanctuary

This is pretty cool, and something I was actually seriously considering doing on Hard, but decided to see the differences between a Bow focused Wizard and a Bow focused Rogue instead (since on a more recent playthrough on Hard, their overall damage was almost equal due to Wizard AoE and more enemies). Going to focus on using Cloudpiercer with the 25% shock enchant as well as Heart of the Storm. On a side note though, the recovery time is very noticeable if you're actually trying to do realistic benchmarks for classes. Going from 0% to 50% is a pretty huge difference in attacks/spells per encounter. Although for a Wizard prior to level 9, the delay with spells isn't nearly as much of an issue as it might be for other classes. It does have a big effect on auto attacks though.

No it isn't, and yes it is. Pretty much every encounter can be handled almost exactly the same way: Send tank in, AoE everything to death (or FF down high priority target, then proceed to AoE everything to death). The encounter design is really bad overall as most of the game is nothing but endless trash that can easily be dispatched with the same single tactic.

If you've seen the more recent episodes, you'd know why this statement doesn't make much sense.

I suppose it just depends on the level you decide to do them. The lower, the harder they might be. I didn't actually get to start mine on my first playthrough until level 9, and by that point, all of the pre Act 3 bounties were a joke. At the start of Act 3 though they started getting interesting. This was also on Normal, so I'm sure it would be even more challenging as you bump the difficulties up. Main issue with bounties is that the XP/reward is really out of balance with the rest of the game. Doing just a few of them could potentially level you up, and the rewards just make the power creep even faster. So it's really not very balanced at all in that regard. Do them early and they are more difficult, yet make you much stronger after. Do them later and they are way easier (while still getting great rewards).

Err, shades/phantoms are easily the most annoying enemies in the game, and they arrive en masse. Ankhegs were super easy to deal with and you almost never, ever had more than three tops (usually only one or two at a time). Ankhegs could be put to sleep pretty much indefinitely while you killed them one by one. Shades, not so much. Plus, Ankhegs didn't randomly teleport to the lowest health/DR of the back row every single time to instantly kill them. Ankhegs never did this, unless you just blindly roamed inside the middle of a pack with your entire group... Then again, I'm just guessing that they would wipe your group like that. I've never had them wipe out a party, even though it was somewhat close the very first time I encountered them. After the first encounter though? Not a chance. Shades on the other hand are always super obnoxious in this game. It pretty much takes Ampliflied Wave spam to make them less of a threat.

If you're talking about "auto-attack while idle", it does nothing on or off.

So you basically want every encounter to work how encounters with Phantoms/Shades work? Then there would be absolutely NO reason to not have your casters wearing plate 100% of the time, because shades will teleport on top of them every single time, trying to take out the back row from the start.

It was worth the money, but it needs to have a major rebalancing patch, on top of a TON of bug fixes (looking at you auto-attack not working) As it stands, the the smoothness of leveling for specific classes is just out of whack, some abilities are borderline broken at the levels you get them and the pacing is also very strange. I get that it's hard to dictate great pacing in a game that offers a player to do what they want, when they want, but it still doesn't feel right, especially with the XP bloat in Defiance Bay.

What I mean is, when the game is tracking damage dealt per character, does it count all of the damage the combat log displays that they've done to an enemy, or does it only count the damage that they actually contributed to a kill? If it's the former, it makes tracking how much damage a class is actually contributing quite a bit harder, because you could do 100+ damage to an enemy that only has a few endurance points left.

It's just a tooltip error. DoTs deal damage in fixed interval ticks, so more int = longer duration = more damage. Well, that's how I assumed it should work, and thought it could be a tooltip error, but I've been avoiding those kinds of abilities just in case.

In regards to what to do with Ring Leader if combat stops? You can simply force attack a unit while the rest remain charmed. There's no downside. Question: how do X damage over Y time spells work in this game? I know how damage over time spells usually work, but the way these read in the spell descriptions, they actually get worse, the higher your INT, because it just increases the duration of the effect, but not the total damage. i.e. 30% damage over 16s (base 10).

I am actually having the exact opposite problem. My characters, unless hit will not auto attack anything. They just stand there after their current target is killed, or after using an ability, especially the ranged characters. This is extremely annoying and makes combat a huge slog.

Does the recovery time penalty on armor affect everything (including spells), or just weapon attacks? I've been going off of the assumption that it affects all combat actions, thus have not been using any armor at all on my three back row characters, other than Aloth's default due to the bonus. They usually don't get hit, but if any of them do end up with something on them, they typically die in a single hit. Is it ever worth using armor on ranged characters? I get tired of being one-shot, but it's infrequent enough that I'm not sure having a 15% - 20% recovery penalty at all times is worth it just for a "maybe". The AI seems to love to target Aloth in particular, as though he's programmed as the highest priority target by any teleporting enemy, even when he hasn't cast anything yet, plus he needs to be rather close to use Fan of Flames (which is why I barely use it).