Okay, so to get it out of the way:
- Yes, the game is in beta state
- Yes, there are a huge number of bugs (HUGE)
- Yes, balance is a total disaster at present
- Yes, there are game-breaking design issues which can ruin a playthrough 40+ hours in
- Yes the GOG cloud sync is terrible, and eventually cloud sync will be totally broken because the save files are too large

But I was struggling through, after one restart 40+ hours in (kingdom death spiral), trying to enjoy the game, and really just slug through it. But good god, the tomb was the last straw. A fight where the only "solution" was to turn the difficulty down to the absolute minimum (soul eater). A 6 day trek there, while god knows what is going on in my kingdom, with the vague auto game-over timer for the Act 3 curse. Random passages, too small to see your characters or control anything, with random rooms on each. Absurd amounts of level drain. Hope you brought 100+ rations, cause it's gonna be a solid month here, with the number of baddies. And on, and on, and on...

And yet, I got to the last fight, and yet, I "won"... and for what? A kick in the nuts (Tristian), near TPK, and a manual walk ALL THE FRIGGEN WAY back through the entire g-damn two-level dungeon, so I can spend another 10 in-game days slugging back to my undoubtedly ruined kingdom, to finally get the game over screen.

I'm done making excuses. This game is bad. I thought I could look past most of the issues because I like CRPG's, and I like Pathfinder, but this game is just not fun and just plain badly executed. I'm done.

OMG, I win this dungeon without any rations on mid difficulty. So stop cry, and enjoi this game.

PS I think you have some problem with yours party.

There's an exit in the throne room which you're supposed to take (where the person you rescued went), it also has a short book episode which is rather important.

In general it's a good idea to check if the curse is under 40 days or so and if that's the case to deal with it first (wait until the attacks trigger and go to the hill) before taking on outside threat, they really need to either add a recommendation for this or change how the curse interacts with the other quests.

You can influence who the soul eater attacks by choosing which names the raven gets, giving the names of tanks is helpful.

The cleric spell death ward can prevent level drain, but yeah, it's overdone in this dungeon.

Changing the difficulty is definitely a good way with dealing the brain farts of balancing by the devs. The difficulty sliders are there to make it enjoyable for people's individual playstyle and party composition (a party consisting of the companions that you like will be much less effective than a party consisting of custommade characters - a good GM would adjust depending on the strengths and weaknesses of the party, the game thinks CR stands for crunchiness) - if near TPKs are a major source of frustration, consider changing one of the two death settings.

The thing with Tristian makes sense if you continue playing.

PS:
If the only thing you have to offer is a variant of 'git gud', please shut up. The only thing you're being helpful with is showing everyone that you're an ass ;-)

The death-eater are really troublesom. I had given every character protection against death magic, but still. They are protected against a lot of stuff, so, even a tank can easily fell to them. Harrim had some Weapon with fire and ice magic, so he was able to deal with his one. The other character on the other hand... And afterwards you get 4 other death eaters, which can still break your whole team. I can understand his frustration.

Still, its part of the story, as the main reason behind this is, that you have to be burned up, when you finally reach vordekai. Vordekai himself is a really simple enemy, thats the reason, why they burn you up before.

And quitting because of not being able to deal with it? Its his own fault and decision. I spent some hours on the same quest, and after having to learn somewhere mid-time of it, that i was not able to make it, i reloaded and made some other stuff first and then went there, with an absolutly optimized team. I deceided against a tank, as you need a lot of magic there.
And it was not really a big problem this time.
I mean, its the final quest to solve a major crises. This quests should not and are never easy.

Since when? This game RELEASE DATE was 25.09.2018 not BETA RELEASE, that is why most ppl are pissed off.

I spent literally about 3 minutes trying to look around the area and talk to Varim, no no avail. Maybe it was another bug in 1.07 or something, but I couldn't believe there wasn't another exit. I gave up about 1/2 way through the trek back through the instance, when I realized I was just tired and frustrated, and that's all I'd been over the last few hours of playing. Not possible; I didn't get the quest until 42 days on the counter (I checked).

This aspect, I think, is by-design. Essentially, it's a soft cap on the number of rest periods you can have while doing the end-chapter quest; too many, and your kingdom fails, because you don't get back in time to deal with the curse. If you don't do the quest on time, on the other hand, it ends you game a different way. I think it's just the design, but...

It sucks ass. You cannot tell how long you have, and/or what's happening "back home", and every additional step on the quest is more stress. That's not fun. I want to enjoy the quest, pack some rations, have a good, enjoyable dungeon crawl with a satisfying ragged-edge conclusion, but the absolutely shitty game design just won't let me. It's taken me more then 100 hours of gameplay to fully realize and internalize that my frustrations are not my fault; it's the way the game is designed. Yes, I realized that after the fact, which would have only set me back a few hours, except...

I had Linzi, the support bard, in my party, and she volunteers her name during the conversation. So literally, the game design is purposefully saying, "if you had a diverse, role-based 'party', in the cooperative group dynamics sense, then fuck you". That's bad GMing, and inexcusable RPG game design, imho. That encounter is a glaring failure in every aspect of game design. I did use the sliders, and once I tweaked it to be closer to "book level" Pathfinder (for reference, that's one level down on DC difficulties from "normal"), and added typical "house rules" (that's heal ailments on rest, for reference), it got a lot better. I was playing on that successfully up until the "total failure of game design" encounter, and it was about right: didn't need to cheese to win, but needed to pay attention to non-trivial encounters. I have less of an issue with the balance than I did when I was trying to play on what I believed to be "normal" (but actually is like CR+5 from what would be book normal). I was assuming that, and it was really only painful in the context of manually travelling out and all the way back to my kingdom. With some sort of quick travel (again, game might have been bugged for me), I would not have minded that much; I found the in-game event with him and the encounter kinda cool. That coolness made the aftermath that much more frustrating, I think (since I was on the ragged edge already, with several members down at the end of the fight, and pretty much spent for resources). I would have worked really well, and then the game kicked me in the face, metaphorically. ^ This, 100%. On the other hand, there are a lot of ass-hats on any forum, so having people like paladinchik89 show up and shit on the discussion like an online avatar of diuretic flatulence is sorta par for the course.

Appreciate the constructive feedback, and maybe I'll go back in the month or so. It has burned/bummed me out for now; I spent the money looking for a good implementation of Pathfinder in CRPG form, and I'm still looking. =/ I said the game is in a "beta state", which I believe is consensus, if not unanimous, opinion. The fact that Owlcat called it a release does not in any way change the actual state of the game.

I, too, am disappointed that I was effectively paying for and playing an open beta. That's not material to my overall frustrations with the game (except, as noted above, where glaring bugs might be giving me a skewed perspective on same aspects of the game design); I was just noting it a priori, to establish a baseline expectation for my experience.

This is a problem with the game design, imho (although, obviously, opinions may vary). If I need to restart the instance with an entirely different and optimized party composition from what has worked for the rest of the game (and, quite frankly, should work for a "normal" Pathfinder party composition), that's not "fun", that's stupid.

I get it: there should be a slider to increase the difficulty to "unfair", for people who want that... and there is. I'm playing on the closest approximation to "book normal" I could make. At that level, I should not have to backtrack for 5+ hours and select/tune a specific party based on the implicit assumption of possession of the Time Stone; that's ridiculous.

Maybe it's a beta problem; I don't know. As it stands, it's broken, period, and it broke me for continuing to try to make the game fun for me.

Yeah, I got the quest with about that much time left on the curse as well. So I waited a couple of weeks (it's an expedition into really mountainous terrain that probably needs to deal with really powerful fey or something again - preparations take time, I'm sure Jamandi would understand ;-)) doing sidequests and kingdom stuff until the curse triggered, then visited the hill before dashing towards Varnhold. Didn't encounter any timer-based trouble there that I noticed.

So limiting the number of times you can rest might be intention, but in that case it is badly designed twice over since not only is it not fun, it can also easily be bypassed. I think the person that blurts out their name is somewhat randomized, for me it was first Harrim and then Amiri (I reloaded because I missed the prisoners the first time around). It's a not a good design decision - the general idea with the names is nice, but the implementation (random characters, no option of telling the NPCs what's going on/to shut up, leading to that 'but thou must reveal names', forcing single close combat without taking into account that certain characters are really unsuited for that) is just a giant NOPE.

It's for the same reason we have so many bugs, I think: They didn't have the time or money to do proper playtesting, which should've told them they should take another look at this encounter.