Haven't played much yet (basically created my first party and only got in like 10-15 minutes of gameplay), so mostly just some first impressions gleaned from character creation/scouring the options menu:
1. Easy mode toggle as described in the options menu is useless if it really only modifies inflicted damage. Difficulty in DnD based games usually lies in disabling abilities and spells that are completely unaffected by damage modifications. No idea how feasible fundamentally changing it at this stage is, but to actually affect difficulty, you would probably want to lower/increase save DCs and saving throws across the board appropriately.
2. I'm not sure how good an idea it is for the saves to scale of the average of two ability modifiers in the long term. I get that this is probably an attempt to avoid safe dump stats, but now it is twice as costly to increase saving throws than it is to increase save DCs in terms of ability modifiers. I just hope it won't lead to something like weak saves being entirely useless and even strong saves only succeeding <50% of the time at high levels.
3. Rolling for HP. I really liked that KotC offered the option to always take the HD average instead of rolling for HP on levelup. No randomness, but also no HP bloat. So I'm somewhat disappointed to not see this option return for KotC2.
4. Starting equipment: How is the assignment handled internally? In the character creation process or in the initialisation of the respective modules? I see nothing wrong with rolling for coin during character creaton and being given the opportunity to purchase basic equipment and supplies, either during creation as well or in an appropriate starting area in a module. An alternative would be smarter assignment of starting equipment. If I build my mantis gladiator for multi-weapon fighting, feats and all, I probably don't want her to lug around a greatsword.
5. Difficulty in general. As I said, haven't gotten far at all yet, but the couple of tries I had at the second(!) encounter went basically: crash door -> too far away from enemies to use surprise round to disable spellcasters -> majority of party loses initiative, gets webbed, then fireballed -> stragglers finished of by barbarian. Granted, I didn't try that often (like I said, haven't gotten much gameplay in yet), so I'm certain I haven't yet tried all tools at my disposal, in part simply because other games basically never offer those (ready vs spell with ranged weapons to try to interrupt the casting?), but the fact remains that the second encounter already involves going up against at least one 5th level spell caster (not sure about the cleric) + melee cronies as a first level party.
Skimming the thread, it does seem like this problem exacerbates the further you go in the game. A pity, considering the encounters in KotC were pretty well paced, not every single encounter has to be against the motherfucking Orc Stockade Gnolls.
6. I think it would be preferable to hide unavailable skill checks in dialogue, at least as an option. It's less cluttered and changes the player focus from noticing what his party can't do to what it can do ("Oh nice, my X can do Y here!" instead of "Oh gee, a long list of skill options, all but one or two of them unavailable.")
7. Might be just my first impression, but I get the feeling the game is less transparent about enemy statistics. At least I haven't found a way to access them yet, as you could in KotC.
Probably won't get a chance to seriously delve in until the next weekend :/
