Two years later, having picked it up for free on Epic (plus the DLC, also free), I finally plowed through it. This time, the story clicked for me a little bit better. Path of the Damned difficulty. Sword and board fighter. Right off the bat, I decided that both of the Overlord's factions were either incompetent or traitorous or both and threw in with the Vendrien Guard. Time to enforce the Overlord's will over this nonsense.
I played a sword + board fighter, with Verse as my melee DPS and Lantry as healer. Once I got Eb, she replaced Barik and became my ranged DPS. The other characters (Sirin, the beastwoman) got no play time at all, so I probably missed out on a bunch of stuff, but eh.
Initially, combat was extremely difficult - the enemies would basically make a bee-line for Lantry, ignoring engagement, whack him to death, then finish the rest of the party. I felt this was extremely cheap, so I resorted to exploiting flaws in the AI - you can use a ranged weapon to pull a couple of guys off a pack and run pretty far away - some of the pursuers would peel off, leaving me facing a smaller sub group, which I could handle. The most difficult part was the boss fight in the Ascension Hall, where I couldn't create the distance to peel the Chorus guys off one or two at a time and kept getting overwhelmed. Eventually, I made a sacrifice play - one of my party members (pretty sure it was Eb) got left in the center of the hall and promptly murdered, while everyone else pulled out of sight. That let me peel off the bad guys one by one and take them down.
Another super difficult boss fight was the super Bane (I already forget the name) in one of the Oldwalls. Not only did the son of a bitch have about a million HP, he'd summon Bane buddies every time he reached 75%/50%/25% health, who'd overrun my guys. Worse, it'd occasionally absorb one of the reinforcement Bane, which let it either heal up or buff up attacks. Eventually, I was able to use the Bane essences to improve my armor and settled on a) focusing down the reinforcements quickly and b) getting out of the way of his powerful attacks.
Other than those boss fights, the Disfavored are probably the most annoying enemy, because of that stupid regeneration power that kicks in once they get hurt. Eventually, if you kill enough of them, you get an ability that disables that specific type of regeneration, but that only happened for me near the end of the game.
Eventually, the party leveled up enough that I was able to take on normal groups of enemies - the trick was lots of line and cone magic that inflicted stun/knockdown/confusion/etc. I still usually pulled sub-groups away from each main group, and took down the mages/rogues first (pretty easy to tell apart, the tanky guys all have shields), but between everyone in my party, I could pretty much keep whole groups stun-locked/knocked down/debuffed and take them down one at a time while the rest staggered around. I do wish there was an option to auto-cast buffs before start of combat, but I guess that's not happening.
I guess there's some kind of new game+ mode, but I don't think I want to plow through that game again right now. It was a lot of fun once everything clicked, but I'm not really sure how much replay value there is - I suppose I could pick a new set of allies (go with the Disfavored or the Chorus or on my own), but I don't expect that to change much. Nor do I really feel like siding with one of those two, while the "on your own" path is basically "kill everyone", which seems mildly boring.
