Hi. I'm concerned this game may be heading in a direction of a linear game, like stage 1,2,3 as in Caer Lem -> Tower -> Castle and so forth and so on.
An D&D inspired Rpg should give you the freedom to EXPLORE. For example : In Baldur's gate SoA, after the initial dungeon and introductions were done with, you could very well venture into a dungeon, bump into a Lich and get your LV 7 party vaporized.
Regarding difficulty here goes a couple sugestions : Dumo the " area challenge rating warning ". What is the point of ADVENTURING, if you already know the area and dungeon you can beat ?? And the ones you can come back later for ??
Give the mosters a fighting chance as well !! A huge part of the fun in D&D, is how easy you can make a bad choice, bad roll and die. The tension of not knowing what's ahead, and if you can handle it, makes for a huge part of the fun.
It's EA, but it already looks way too easy as it is. A group of 4 being ambushed by a couple wolves, few bandits or ghouls has proved to have pretty much 0 challenge.
I think either increasing the number of monsters or improving their AI would be a start, or this game, despite having amazing potential, might become another trivial, walk in the park RPG with no challenge as you get ahead in LV, and the mosters remain dumb and few in numbers.
I don't even min max, or make my chars full of 18 rolls, I ran a reasonable 17 - 15 -14 - 10 - 10 - 10.
Hope devs can consider this and deliver us and amazing game !!!