Some thoughts based on an incomplete playthrough.
It's my observation that problems that people have with games often have to do less with specific features or design choices, and more with how those design choices come together.
Let's look at Pillars of Eternity's wilderness encounters under Path of the Damned difficulty (The One True Difficulty Level™). Many of them are quite challenging. I would never call them "trash combat" and individually, they're pretty fun to overcome.
PoE, however, has a peculiar sort of design. In the standard oldschool RPG model, you have a main quest, whose difficulty gradually goes up, plus lots of optional content, including "happy hunting ground"-type areas that have combat that usually isn't incredibly involved. Typically, you might find yourself unable to progress in the main quest until you've gone grinding for XP in the happy hunting ground, via killing monsters or solving various sidequests. BG1's wilderness areas excel at this, field after field full of trash mobs you can roll over while journeying from town town. It's not "good encounter design", but it is a well-paced, tradtional RPG experience.
In PoE/PotD, however, the optional locations in every area are noticeably more difficult than the main path. It's what I call the "
Deathclaw Promontory Design Principle". In other words, the traditional model is inverted. You don't grind optional content to be able to progress on the main quest. Instead, you might find yourself pursuing the main quest further so you can revisit and complete the optional content.
And hence the pacing problem. In most story-driven RPGs, the main quest encounters are inevitable more likely to be more interestingly designed, more story-relevant, more likely to involve intelligent human foes rather than brute monsters, more likely to yield interesting loot, etc. And so you have a game where the player's sense of pacing is skewed and unexpected. He might spend a great deal of time on dealing with combat that is relatively less interesting, and less time with the combat that's supposed to be more interesting.
Say I run into a large horde of lions in some out of the way cove in Woodend Plains and Stormwall Gorge. A bunch of melee monsters that maul your tank to death in seconds if you don't control them properly with debuffs. That's pretty cool. Three times, however, and it's not so much that you're not enjoying yourself (I'd say every encounter is just different enough that it's not quite a matter of repeating the exact same tactic three times), but you begin wondering whether you should really be spending so much time in a wilderness area doing something so comparatively unimportant. It's all in the pacing. The overall impression one gets is that the wilderness areas aren't really BG1-style wilderness romps at all, but actually dungeon areas that happen to be above ground.
So, what I would do with PoE/PotD is actually consider making some of the encounters in every area LESS difficult. I think that in general, "monolithic" encounters composed entirely of one sort of enemy should have an upper cap on their difficulty that should rarely be exceeded. If it is exceeded, there'd better be some damn good loot there. Ideally, PoE's wilderness areas should receive BG1-style NPC party encounters with interesting loot, and
that should be the "difficulty spike" in every area that the player spends a lot of time cracking. Defeating these encounters should perhaps grant some experience points as well.
As far as loot goes, it's not really that PoE's loot selection is bad, but loot
placing should be made more unique, so you might need to go to a specific place in the world and beat a hard encounter to find the only free Fine Rapier in the early game, or whatever.
But even without fancy NPC enemies, I think some relatively minor tweaking of existing encounters could make PoE/PotD a better-paced experience. Of course, I imagine that as I progress in the game and my characters become more powerful, I might reach a point where this pacing issue sorts itself out naturally, though at the expense of difficulty across the board.
