That is to say, winning hard fights never feels as rewarding as it should due to the post-fight HP regeneration, per encounter spells, party members being KO’d at zero health and unrestricted resting. Defeating a tough encounter, no matter where you are and what your party is, always just brings you back to square one, which is having all your stuff recharged and ready for the next slaughter. Never do you have to consider going through a series of fights with progressively dwindling resources, or sacrificing one of your assets to win.
Even worse, Deadfire has thrown all pretences of Vancian spellcasting and resource management out the window. For non-spellcasters, each character has a pool of “ability points” to spend on active awesome buttons in each encounter as he sees fit, with each ability having its own cost (for example, the paladin resource is “zeal”, and it costs 1 zeal to heal a guy with lay on hands or 4 to revive him in combat). The pools recharge automatically after every fight, so you can spam your bestest abilities all the time with little concern. Spellcasters are not very different – instead of ability points they are limited by how many spells of a given tier they can cast in a single fight. These of course recharge between encounters too, so feel free to nuke everything with chain lightning in every fight and try to ignore the lingering questions in the back of your head concerning the complete uselessness of over half your spellbook.
The removal of resource management also rears its ugly head when it comes to the wounds that characters take upon KO. All wounds, no matter their severity, can be removed by resting for 8 hours and using whatever food you have in your inventory, which translates into healing skull fractures and PTSD by munching on some oranges. Plus, resting is unlimited both in terms of availability (no camping supplies are necessary to rest) and scope (you can always rest anywhere), so the wound mechanic is kind of pointless in practice.
