Zombie Evelyn is very underpowered as she has no resists/talents or anything lol makes it easier just to kill her so you don't have to face her regularly

doubt that eye gouge is underpowered but i might have a suggestion to add it into the dagger-combo system with smth like " X chance to cause bleeding (i mean gouging an eye causes bleeding)" or at 5 combo charges extended time/ increased chance of the blindness. but obviously not sure if its some bit over the edge

@Vashboosle: I honestly have no idea what a Zombie Evelyn is--does she appear when running some sort of alternate quest line? Please educate me!

@Fumio: I agree, not sure if Eye Gouge is weak, but you are definitely right about the bleeding!

you might attempt to put some enchanted eye gouge skill on some item (maybe artifact dagger) which has this blind+ bleed :P

@Fumio: Empowered Eye Gouge, basically. That's interesting. I'll file the idea away for later. :)

Zombie evelyn happens when you kill evelyn in town before you find out its her through searching; she's a necromancer so she resurrects herself when you go find her in her lair and even has special dialogue. That would explain why she's probably not touched if you didn't even know about her haha

Wow, I never knew you could do that. Serves me well for never attacking civilians...

First of all, I love Epic Encounters :) thx!
With that said, here are some thoughs:

Lightning Bolt (old Blits Bolt) could use some tweaks/buffs:

Problems:
- even if you have 2 enemies in a perfect line, if one of ur characters is in a ~30 degree angle in front of the first target the piercing bolts will change its direction to target him instead most of the time.
- if u stack 2 instances of shock and the stun fails you ended up cleansing your enemy from shock and you did not get any cc out of it. With fire u can keep ur enemy resistance very low while burning and you are not afraid of cleansing your enemy.
- while flare from the the fire school remains as a viable long range decent damage nuke for the entire playtrough, lightning bolt in the end game still costs 4 AP, the same as Chain lighning, while still having all these drawbacks.

Suggestions:
- Remove friedly units from the piercing bolt's targets options
- Remove the saving throw for the stun (both shock instances already go trough a saving throw)


Rain
Although the old rain could be considered too easy and too efficient, I do miss my ability to control the weather (#StormXMen feelings), its such a unique feature from divinity that I feel like its a sin to completely "remove" it.

- as is (rain is casted, makes everyone wet and goes away) I only use rain to remove burning from my team or clean up the battlefield after a fight.
- it does not create water puddles, as wrongly stated by the tooltip

Suggestion:
- Make rain last a little longer, just not as long as before to prevent cheap freezing abuse.
- Increase AP cost and recommended school level if necessary, I mean, you are controlling the weather!


Bard talent:
Love the talent and its animation, I'd flag it as op but I just can't live whithout it given how hard tactician with vitality boost has been.

- The buff to shield specialist procs even if a target blocks while dual wielding, so the reaction and the buff itself are wasted.
- Allow companions to learn the GrandStander, +2 Bard is priceless and saves 9 ability points. As is, (and considering the difficulty level of EE) if i want to make the best use of my team's abilities, I have to focus bard on one of my main characters.

Suggestion:
- Implement a "wearing shield" check before activating the bard's shield specialist buff reaction.
- Allow companions to learn Grandstander to open up for more team comp possibilities


Bairdotr:
Having that "boost" to ranger instead of a point itself makes it really cheap for her to reach 5 in this school (only requires 10 points). Not sure if its too op.
Jahan for exemple starts with a free point in water but, in order to max it, he still needs to use 14 points.

Suggestion:
- Give a similar boost for the other companions (like water school for jahan and scoundrel for Wolgraff).
- Make Bairdotr have one used point (like the others) in ranger.
ps: I'd really prefer the first option since EE is very hard, also since companions do not have access to trait buffs I think it'd be ok for them to save 4 ability points for something else late game.


Touch of the grave:
- Its too severe, I end up having to ressurect my dead char while teleporting him as far away from the battle as possible, otherwise it will die again in 1 or 2 hits due to low constitution. That with the turn AP and movement debuff makes it so that I have avoid any action with the ressurected character for the entire "touch of the Grave" duration.

Suggestion:
- Tone its debuffs down a little bit.
Ps: I do like the addition of touch of the grave.


Most of these changes I'll implement on my EE myself. I hope my feedback can be useful. :) Thx again!

@e m p:

Thanks for playing and thanks for your great feedback!

Lightning Bolt:
- Good call on removing friendly fire, I think.
- I designed Shock interactions to mimic how Chill works, I'm not sure if changing Shock to behave differently would make sense, and I cannot change Chill.

Rain:
- The main reason it was changed was because it was too easy to combo Chill with it to produce Freeze. The reduced duration makes it a little harder. Additionally, though, the weather effect can cause ugly frame drops.
- It does still produce a puddle. Usually it appears at the center of the radius, but sometimes it goes elsewhere--I have no control over this aspect of the spell.

Bard:
- Good call on the shield check.
- I cannot allow companions access to Grandstander without breaking saved games, sadly :(

Bairdotr:
- The boost to Ranger/Scoundrel for Bairdotr/Wolgraff was removed in the most recent update because it caused a bug with learning spells when having 6 points in said ability. They now are given a "free" talent instead, but these changes won't appear in existing games, only new playthroughs.

Touch of the Grave:
- It's intended to be a severe debuff because death is supposed to be very impactful. I don't think it should be the case that a character can be resurrected and able to immediately contribute to the fight.
- I had thought of introducing some higher tiers of resurrection that could bypass or limit the effects of Touch of the Grave.

Glad u liked,

improved ressurection would be great indeed, specially bc Reaper (Morning Person) is mostly for two-handed characters.

i've been playing around with a crit-dual wand-erer, pretty strong but 1 major flaw is that i have to repair my wands every 1-2 fights which breaks the flow tbh (like broke my both wands in 1 boss fight early game). a little boost in durability might be awesome. since fieldsmith feels so wasted on an int char xS

@Fumio: Noted, we've experienced this as well in some of our games.

After having played through Epic Encounters twice, once with a Lone Wolf and again without on Tactician I can say that Lone Wolf is disgustingly underpowered. I had a serious lack of damage problem running a Lone Wolf Tank-Damage Warrior, Hydro-Witch Mage and a Bow based archer this led to me all inning on Speed and Preception leaving my characters extremely low on health. It was so bad I had to take Glass Cannon on my Archer which totally bricked my ability to complete the additional content as she would just fall over when a random chain lightning hit her. This led the mod to feel insanely hard and unforgiving. After running again with a full tank, Rogue, Archer, Witch-Pyro Mage all of my problems evaporated and the mod was extremely smooth and enjoyable.

You may also want to consider buffing Bows a little more, when I switched from Bow to Crossbow my Archer's damage went up considerably at 84% crit chance Barrage would decimate enemies. I recall my Vampiric Arrow critting for 2500 vs my Bow which was 1500 on the same mob. Not to mention the damage of the Crossbows were way higher allowing me to spam Silver and Fire Arrows for only 4 AP with 5 AP worth of damage.

We had considered buffing Lone Wolf's AP gain at high levels in the past, but never got around to it. In part, this was due to some players showcasing some incredibly powerful lone wolf strategies, but some key components to those have changed since then. I will make a note of this for when I have time again.

Much of the issue with bow vs crossbow is, as you've alluded to, the fact that crossbow's AP cost is bypassed with special arrows(!) or spells. It's a difficult issue to tackle, and is potentially easiest to solve by equalizing their AP costs and finding some other way to differentiate them from one another. As it stands, bows (especially with -1 AP rolled and Audacity) can achieve much higher damage-per-AP with normal attacks, but this advantage is muddied when considering other means of attacking.

Tried double lone wolf on tactician up to level 6. I have to agree with Fuzedknight. I'm not saying it looks impossible, but it's just not fun. Many fights I had to cheese by reducing mobs one by one by fleeing / kiting which feels tedious and doesn't add any value. My party is 2h warrior with pure mage.
There are several issues actually here:

1) Hard disable / debuff vulnerability. Having both of your guys disabled means gg usually. You can deal with this by investing in grit/wp but it doesn't completely avoid situations like this - encounters are still binary. Debuffs are also pretty brutal because you have less party members and skills to cleanse. I am not sure how to fix this - one idea is to give LW +1 grit/wp but completely protecting heroes from debuffs/disables would be overpowered and it wouldn't deal with the root of the problem - binarity of debuff/disable for the success of the battle. It's also hard because encounters have to be balanced both for party of 4 and 2xLW, making LWes ignore debuffs could trivialize some content. Maybe give LW same treatment as Walk it Off talent, but stronger, like make any debuff/disable last 1 turn ?

2) Lack of damage. Ability points and 2AP bonus don't increase damage as much as having additional party member. This is a huge problem for the mod, because many times even if you hard disable/debuff a target, you can't kill it fast enough because of increased HP pools. Most fights I simply don't kill enemies fast enough. Also I read that in this mod there are many AP buffs in the endgame which makes 2ap bonus even more lackluster. Even in my low level experience I already see many +AP items, I can see where it's going..

3) Lack of talents. Having to invest in crafter points/talents while full party can have dedicated crafter bot. This is annoying, even with addition of field smith / alchemist. We need to keep in mind that LW have 2x less talents, so we may consider every LW talent point worth 2x more, compared to the full 4x party. In original unmodded game this wasn't a big deal, because there atleast you would get best crafted weapons, and most talents were so-so, so atleast you didn't feel points spent on crafting stuff are wasted. In this mod there are many important talents that I would prioritize compared to field smith / alchemist / scientist

4) In the mod LW gets additional reactions, but it looks like a small buff and reactions in general don't look exciting for a 2-man party (maybe it's just me, I don't know). I see it's useful but not strong enough to compensate for the lack of additional party member. Demon/Angel are endgame talents, and Bard needs a big investment from items - item slots are precious for 2 LW so I would give priority to other items instead of a +bard stuff. Maybe Predator is good for LW ? I haven't tried yet

5) I understand the mod is balanced around team synergy - there's not much synergy to be gained from the party of 2. For example, my party of mage with astrologer's gaze and 2h warrior - the warrior does not benefit much from the debuff (with minor exceptions such as curse of cuts or elemental enchants). This limits the list of effective classes / builds severely.

Also I had the feeling the fighter brings very little cause his damage is not exciting, he had to raise str to 10 just for his basic skills to work reliably and in the end even if I KD a target I can't kill fast enough (like I said above), My caster was carrying him through most fights because atleast he can do decent damage with staff of magus using staves higher level than him (which feels like cheesing also) / gaze talent debuffs.

All this raises many questions, like - is LW additional "impossible" difficulty level ? Or is it just a game flavor with comparable (but broken currently) difficulty for players who hate item and skill management of a full party (what I wanted) ? If it's the former, I may consider it a "masochist mode" and skip - I know there are many people who like to suffer or accept cheesing/fleeing/reloading all the time, so let them have their fun why not :) But if it's the latter, LW needs serious, and maybe even huge buffs to provide difficulty experience comparable to a 4 char party.

I know I can play the version without increased vitality of enemies, but it doesn't address all issues with LW, and I would also worry that normal vitality would trivialize some content not balanced for it