Just finished game - a few criticisms (second try)

[daniel.mantell]

Overall, my experience was extremely positive.  There are a few issues that I think could be tweaked fairly easily that would improve the experience:

1.  Penetration:  it wasn't always clear to me how incredibly paramount this stat is for fights, though I eventually realized that's why "legendary" enchantments are so expensive and so worthwhile to get.  Once I did start paying more attention, I realized that weapons weren't always consistent about having their penetration score in their info section.  Similarly, only a few spells/abilities detail what their penetration is, and it's not clear to me how I'd figure it out for those that don't.  I would like to see this stat more consistently displayed on weapons as well as spells/abilities.

2.  Armor:  sometimes the actual armor value of a piece of armor (as gleaned from the character stats) didn't quite match up with what you thought it was going to be when looking at the item info.  I would like to see this be more consistent as well.

3.  Quests:  There were so many quests!  This is a great thing, however, it could be a little difficult to keep them all organized all and I felt like I had to use pen-and-paper quite a bit to do it - like allowing us to sort by turn in, and maybe by putting little onscreen "hats" on folks when you have a quest to turn in so that they are easier to find.

4.  Grimoires:  Not being able to sub in spells to grimoires didn't happen to appeal to me, but I understand that it represents a design decision - one that made, for example, a certain spell both possible and special, since the only way to have it it to be using that one particular grimoire.  So my criticism isn't that you made a choice that wasn't my favorite, but that I found it incredibly ponderous to keep a collection of all grimoires, since I couldn't easily distinguish between a duplicate grimoire I could sell vs. one I wanted to keep for my collection, and there were too many to simply hold in my character's bags.

5.  Similar issue with pets.  There were just so many, and it was very time consuming to distinguish between them, as you had to actually right click and bring up the info sheet in order to find out what their special was.  Also, the lack of a dedicated pet tab meant a little more wading through gigantic inventories.

6.  I feel like the AI scripting was missing some elements that would have made it more robust - for example, options that paid attention to enemy armor class, both objectively as well as relative (to deem whether one should cast big spells and debuffs).  Also, being able to drag items around in the priority list rather than having to repeatedly click them up or down and then scroll the screen, would be huge and would feel much more fluid.  Finally, perhaps this is a more complex animal, allowing abilities to cycle in a list rather having a set priority, would be nice.  I.e. it would be nice if I could put several debuffs/buffs in the same grouping, and simply cycle through the group rather than have to create a separate group for each spell.

Hopefully there's some useful stuff here - again, great job!