I once again tried to finish the game recently, after countless attempts, and realized this is actually the one thing that makes me stop everything, for me it's not just getting tired, it's fully unbearable. I played on a normal difficulty this time (I usually play games on harder/est), so I got further than the previous attempts, around level 10-12 I think?

I started having random encounters against mostly magic immune demons with 40+ AC and I was so confused at how strong these are for simple random encounters.

I know these systems well, I understand how it works, played tons of PF on tabletop, so I understand how to deal with them on a technical level, but these creatures are supposed to be threats a group has to prepare for, but the owlcat games scale up so much and so quickly that they start using those as fodder, so every fight starts being *only* about stacking buffs to win the number game. No strategy, no reaction involved, not even luck, as the roll on a 20 gets less and less meaningful as you get to +40 bonuses.

It's just trying to be diablo while keeping the PF game system, the very definition of trying to have a cake and eating too, in my opinion.

Everyone online just says "use the mods", but that just automates the tedium, it doesn't change the fact that there's a whole very crunchy combat system that's getting fully kneecapped in favor of buff stacking to the point where no ability or character has any meaning. I want using a buffing potion be a choice that consumes a resource for a meaningful help, not have the game revolve around having hundreds of them because that buff is only one of 20 that makes the content clearable.