First, let me say how much I love this game. 9/10. If the few issues I have with it are mended, 10/10, and I will buy it for some friends. Total nostalgia and hommage to Baldur's Gate/Planescape series and the other strategy RPG's i grew up with and played relentlessly when I was a wee lad.
Yep, it's a good one. I've been loving the hey out of it too.
However, one thing that i enjoyed more about those games that I am not enjoying so much in PoE is how you basically have two health bars. The endurance versus health is totally unecessary and adds a level of tedium for me that breaks the fun of the game. Having to camp way too much. Having to rest way too much, and no way to restore health by the priest/druid in the party casting a spell out of combat? Come on... Something easily done in Baldur's Gate that helped catalyze the gameplay rather than artificially extend it...
Granted I am only about 10 hours into the game, but I am not enjoying having to rest and camp so much.
Your problem isn't the dual health bar. Your problem is that you have to rest too much. That's because you're not very good at the game, which is hardly surprising if you've only put 10 hours into it. I clocked about 75 hours in the BB and it still took me a couple of hours to get comfortable with the real thing.
I will assure you, though, that once you've got it figured out, you do not need to rest too much. More than half the time I'm resting because of fatigue, not because I'm out of health or spells.
I.e., take a deep breath and read up on the core mechanics, then experiment a bit and it'll start going fine. The keys are (1) locking things down with your tank, (2) attacking your enemy's weakest defense (Deflection, Fortitude, Reflex, Will) in order to either do direct damage or debuff a defense that lets you do damage, and (3) the best defense is a strong offense.
I also don't like how easily spells are interrupted while trying to cast.
Give your caster higher Resolve or keep him away from the front line. I bet you couldn't cast worth a damn if someone was trying to stab you in the kidneys while you're doing it.
I dislike how few spells you get to cast (using the tired method of spellcasting that even DnD abandoned, that of memorizing your spell "slots") before having to rest yet again.
Again, not my experience. Use the per-encounter abilities in every encounter, and bring out the big guns in the big fights. I'm finding that I run out of spells and health usually around when fatigue hits.
Wizard in the party is getting basically two-shot knocked out in some fights.
Then figure out a way to keep him out of trouble better. The incorporeal undead are nasty this way though as they target your wizard first and can teleport in, but there are ways of dealing with those too.
Reduce the damage EVERYONE does across the board or increase everyone's health. Make fights last longer with everyone doing less damage to one another so that those lovely nice spells you coded into the game can actually get used, rather than just HEAL HEAL HEAL burn burn burn.
I strongly disagree. Nothing is duller than a fight that drags on due to hitpoint bloat. If you're using a good strategy, most fights are over in about 30 seconds with everyone still standing. I've been playing without a priest for a stretch and it's not materially more difficult. I'm extremely happy that Obsidian made fights challenging by having things do more damage rather than having them have more hitpoints.
Combats are either really fast, or not fast enough, or your wizard/priest/monk gets hammered and knocked out almost immediately before the (lets be honest) very slow cast time of some spells can go off.
Play better.
Fighter could use quite a few more class abilities as well.
Fighters get the same number of class abilities as every other class.
Maybe I am bad at the game and don't quite "get it" just yet, but I am playing on Normal and some fights are just impossibly tough, with 5 members in the party (namely the battles with the Priests in the Lord's castle --- their unavoidable spells hit entirely too hard in my opinion).
Yep, you are bad at the game and don't get it yet. There's no shame in that; it takes more than 10 hours to learn for most of us.
Thanks for your time, guys, and thank you for giving us such an amazing game. It was well worth the money spent and I play it literally any moment I can spare.
Stick with it. IME it wouldn't be the same without the frustration. The feeling of achievement is that much more glorious when you figure out something you were doing wrong and turn a formerly unwinnable fight into a doddle.
Also... you may be underleveled for what you're attempting. Raedric's Hold is a reasonable challenge for a level 4-5 full party or so. If you're going in at level 3 with a smaller party, you're going to have a hard time.