Alright, now I'm in the dungeon. My party is already sixth level, but I assume that even without mod content, my characters would already be 5th level at least. However, the encounters in the Earth temple still seem to be designed for a first level party. The only one that where my characters were actually harmed was in one battle against a bunch of ghouls and ghasts. I had to play through it twice, mostly because I had characters who were already low on health, with few remaining spells and didn't realize that there were ghasts mixed in among the ghouls. I reloaded and winning was not such a big deal at all.
There was one encounter with a dire rat. Seriously? A single dire rat against a 4-6th level party? Another with one torturer and a bugbear. Another with a bunch of spiders. Another with a long corridor of skeletons. After playing through half of the corridor, I decided to just nuke the rest of it with a fireball and finish off the excruciating boredom and tedium that comes from playing through battles with trash mobs so easy that they cannot even scratch my party in slow turn based mode. At least Arcanum had real time for dealing with shit like this. TOEE has fireball though, which also let me quickly finish off a room full of goblins and a single ogre.
I also just discovered my fighter's AWSUM button. Whirlwind attack was never so cool in real time mode. I just got the ability, and to test it out, marched my enlarged reach fighter right into a room full of ghouls. Couple of rounds of whirlwind attack and all were dead. Too bad it seems like the game won't be providing any challenges worthy of such an ability. At best I will probably just be using it to mow down trash mobs.
Skeletons, goblins, bugbears, spiders, ghouls are not at all a challenge for any party above 2nd level.
Overall, this game basically combines the worst combat encounters ever with perhaps the best combat system of all time in an RPG. What a pathetic waste.
