Well at least your heart is in the right place, but dude, for the last time, I don't have a problem with difficulty. I'm doing just fine, as I said above - the last time I had to reload was Raedric fight (and possibly the godhammer speck quest, for keeping the lights up in defiance bay, but not sure). I'm not getting rolled, I win all of the fights decisively. I'm just annoyed with a bunch of design decisions that are frankly baffling, especially coming from people that shipped the whole thing as IE: 2015 edition and actually worked on IE games back in the day. They had literally DECADES to improve on IE formula and all they managed to do is to make it worse somehow.
It's funny how everyone instantly assumes that i'm a scrub, even though I know almost every encounter in IWD and BG2 (indlucing a heavily modded version with vastly increased difficulty) by heart, did multiple runs as solo/duo/single class gimmicks back in the day and the thing that got me into RPGs in the first place was a walkthrough of IWD in a local gaming journal that I used to (re)read religiously while on a loo (dem were the good days).
From what you are saying, I'd advise you to forget the IE games as a reference point. The IE games' experience isn't translatable. PoE is deceptive that it is, calling itself a "spiritual successor" whatever that means, but I think that really it's not.
Regarding the squandered years of experience,
I think the root of the problem with the IE games', and by extension with PoE's varied reception stems from the fact that the IE games started as an attempt to replicate in a videogame the PnP experience. As a consequence, players approach the IE games from inherently different starting points. According to whether they have any PnP experience, which they may or may not want to recreate via the videogame, they may approach the IE games as videogames, or as "a PnP simulation" of sorts.
These different approaches imply different degrees to which every player is prepared to take part in the "construct the world as you play" activity. That's something known to PnP players. The game's being fun requires some cooperation on the player's part in PnP, and even more than that in a videogame approximation of PnP, where there is no DM to take much of this load off the player.
So in the case of PoE, Josh was faced with the dilemma, does he design a game that's more a videogame, or one that's more "like PnP on the computer", and in many cases he went with the former. The funny thing is that he probably did this exactly because of his experience. He knew what kind of players he was adressing and that PnP means nothing to them, they largely wouldn't self police themselves and then blame the designers for being able to abuse the game, etc.
I think the combat system also looks the way it does because of Josh being conscious that he is developing a videogame. Hence the complex calculations and the granularity. He expected that hardly many players would take interest in how combat resolution works, because they would be playing it as a videogame.
What I think he missed to account for is that after all the complex videogame rules and calculations are set out, it is still a much more nerve-wrenching experience to watch the toons' next weapon swing and to feel the rush when the simple dice decided that you score a hit, or the relief when the enemy missed you when you had 5 hp left. This kind of instant mini-gambling is imo the most thrilling thing about the BG/IWD games' combat, and also perfectly catches the feeling of PnP dice roll combat.
Having said these things, and knowing that PoE consciously deviated from "PnP simulation" in the direction of a videogame, does it still deserve to be called a "spiritual successor" to the IE games? It's not the kind of IE successor I imagined when I backed it.
