Why endure poor gameplay when you can invest some time to speed it up?
I am not sure i follow ... so you don't want to endure poor gameplay and you want to speed it up and your solution to this is to spend hours and hours grinding??? isn't that wasting even more of your time on poor gameplay?
Git gud. An hour spent grinding is two hours saved playing. It's an art of maximizing xp yield and making the power growth curve spike. Nobody grinds on the giant rats in the starting cellar.
Exactly, the AI already has the huge disadvantage of being braindead which is why the only way of making combat feel even a little bit challenging and engaging is by fighting stronger enemies to level the plain field between you and the AI, forcing you to concentrate in the battle to avoid making mistakes.
For
what?
Overpowering your character is just overkill since you're not only fighting braindead AI, you're fighting braindead AI that's also weaker then you, it's about as fun as having a boxing match with a 5 year old.
I'd love to, too bad it's forbidden.
Once again i am not sure i follow, i didn't say spells shouldn't be used for winning battles, all i said is that developers should give players alot of options to choose from as opposed to a linear progression system that forces players to progress in a certain way for the sake of balancing the game like in the example you brought up earlier:
Spells come in following varieties:
Those that do damage.
Those that kill outright.
Those that weaken enemies making them easier to kill by conventional means.
Those that strengthen you making it easier to kill enemies by conventional means.
The response to these spells is... as you acquire spells that do more damage, you encounter enemies with more hitpoints so these new spells are no more effective than the weaker ones were before them. As you acquire spells that kill, any enemies worth using these (always highly expensive) spells on are universally immune to them. As you acquire buffs and debuffs, you encounter enemies so bloated that using every buff and debuff you have is always mandatory (and any actually game-changing debuff, again, doesn't work on anything it is worth using against).
So
what's the fucking point?
Fuck it. I'd rather acquire any of these several areas before I am "intended" to and actually put them to use without feeling robbed of their power.