*shrug* Those are not my opinions, not PrimeJunta's, so I don't know if he agrees. I'd just write my own review if I wanted to (and then we'd be nearly at 7!), but I don't.
I think the easiest way for any player to check the synergy at work is the Adra Dragon on PoTD with a non-munchkin party. That's one of the few (too few) situations where enemy stats are high enough to force you to hobble their defences, and you're only fighting 1 enemy so it's easy to keep track. I've shelved POE until xpack so excuse me for fuzzy details, but there you find cases where, say, the player who had been robotically recycling a few spells like Adragan and Mental Binding left and right discovers those are only hitting once on a blue moon. While many players, idiots as they are, will choose to just reload until their shitty 'tactic' lucks out or complain on the Internet, others will realise that things like Scrolls of Valour and the Eldritch Gaze potion, which previously looked like pointless crafted items, can now be a key ticket to producing more reliable strategies for the party. The player then begins organising the party: e.g. Eder, previously able to tank things without batting an eye, now finds he has to stay back, and maybe becomes the support guy reading Scrolls of Valour for the spellcaster who's trying to debuff the dragon. Since the 3-defenses system operates for most abilities and not just spell effects, learning and manipulating them becomes even more important in such a situation: there's no point paralysing the dragon with a lucky Mental Binding on a high-stat Cipher if your paladin goes to whack it and misses all the time with his special ability.
The first problem POE has is that it's currently very difficult to encounter such a numerical challenge. This is compounded by the Graze problem mentioned in the review. So people will just messily hit and graze their way to victory and not even realise how inefficiently they're fighting. A well built 6-player party on Level 12, half the time, won't even be too fazed by Adra - (though the converse of that is, anybody complaining about Adra's "bloat" isn't really manipulating the combat system efficiently, either.)
The second problem is that POE already offers many ways to manipulate the system precisely to change the battlefield, but they do not appear that way to the players. A Globe of Invulnerability is easy to understand: total immunity to all low level spells, and you get a huge shiny globe that shows it, and enough enemies use it even in BG1 for you to learn the lesson. POE does subpar on all of those points. Nobody takes Eldritch Gaze potions or Scrolls of Valour seriously. Combine that with the shitty ethereal spell effects that I've criticised since the very first videos, and you get a situation where players, once again, brute force way to victory only thanks to the low difficulty levels, without even understanding that they were targeting the strongest defence of the critter or something.
To me, POE has been surprisingly enjoyable solo for this reason: the limited parameters, the limited chaos, and the added difficulty (at least once you mod down the retarded XP bonuses) are all conducive to an experience where you're really calculating what's going on because you can't just charge in. Now, if only the game would be like that to begin with, then we'd have something really cool on the table.
