Combat remains a weak point of the Pillars formula, and it's abundantly apparent in this expansion. On the default difficulty, without allowing the game to scale up the challenge to my party (which was recommended), I still struggled immensely with average enemy groups of lowly cultists, wiping multiple times in some cases. The new monk-class enemies could dodge right past my tanky melee line and go after my squishy damage dealers with seeming impunity, for instance, and had far too much health for me to be able to focus fire them down before they turned the entire encounter into a rout. Conversely, the enemies who were supposed to be big and scary (including the towering Eyeless war constructs central to the story, and the colossal, set piece final boss) were felled with ease, leaving hardly a lasting scratch on my party.
Simply put, Pillars still does a poor job of giving you the tools you need to manage basic party tasks like tanking and crowd control in chaotic situations with lots of weaker enemies. Where these options do exist, they're often buried so deep in the corner of one of its far too exhaustive spell lists, forcing you to do huge amounts of pausing, reading, and needless micromanagement, even when your party AI settings are fine-tuned to perfection and your difficulty is set to default. It's all the worst parts of playing a caster in a tabletop RPG like Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 ported to digital form. Obsidian's combat designers would do well to start balancing their encounters more on smart tactical positioning, good party AI settings, and a shrewd class composition instead of expecting you to memorize 100 spells across six characters and always know which one is needed to deal with a particular enemy.
