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Regarding the difficulty I made this:

how the Huge Kodiak boss stats change between difficulty levels. Of course the higher difficulty changes also the AI (Hard/Nightmare). But stats are already a good term of comparison. I think maybe I need to make the Normal a bit easier...

No, not easier (as said before: my "normal" difficulty PoV) - the Kodiak was absolutely doable, it took all my mana and a fully healed party but was one of the more interesting battles. Sure, with more time and thoughts the bear shouldn't even need healed chars - but I'm lazy ;) [and therefore probably not a completely untypical "normal" player ^^]

After testing a bit I think the main problems are indeed the early battles, once you have 3 chars in your party the difficulty is OK, have reduced slightly the Nightmare though.
I think will be "too easy" again for Nightmare, but some battles should still be tough, like 1st Ratmen. You should have no problems with single enemy fights now, I added some "damage mitigation" so you shouldn't be killed quickly anymore
Uploading 0.8.4 which hopefully will be the last difficulty tweak for this first Act. At this point I'm only interested if something is TOO hard, but for "TOO EASY" complaints, I'll take them in consideration only if are boss battles and nothing else

I like how many "okay THIS is the last balancing build" we've had so far

I wasn't saying I couldn't have eventually beaten the ratmen (but it did look dire). But right now the battles I deem too tough start with enemies being faster and having too much damage for my back row. It is a pretty frustrating concept. Before we are done with this, there will be a talk about speed in general. I haven't increased agility on any of my last 3 parties. With speed values being what they are, I am sure that in 9 of 10 situations, it doesn't change the starting order to skip agility altogether. And at least in Loren it was the case that speed only decided who started, after that ability delay was a much greater contributor.

I really think we should give Troyen's thoughts some serious consideration at some point too. Even now wouldn't be bad but it would mean so many balancing patches. I think the game would benefit from slowing down combat a bit. No more killing opponents before they can even act. How about this. Could you add some side battles to the game, that don't reward exp/loot and don't have to be defeated. They use normal mobs, but there is a battlefield modifier that cuts all damage and healing in half. Then we could test it ourselves. I think something would need to be done about ability costs too but it's a start.

I am gonna tell you exactly how I am abusing the current version of Invigorating Prayer midfight. I throw it on a character and then I take my favorite "junk action", switch position, to get the regen fast and act very soon again. Of course this is a problem with all SP regen and we need the Loren 2 engine to deal with it

moving hunter talk to next post

Hey Troyen, why'dya delete? It was a valid point

I'm gonna try to compile some combat weirdness here.

Hunter: If in the front row, aimed shot does more damage than normal shot to enemy front row. If in the back row, aimed shot and normal shot deal the same damage. They deal like half damage to back row compared to front row, but still the same across the skills. When the back row mobs come to the front row the damage doesn't change, so maybe it's about thief/mage classes and not row. Melee attack is my most powerful move, beating even Critical Hit, which seems to do the same damage as my shots. I have barely touched my hunter's weapons, but his mainhand does earth damage, and the skeletons are earth resistant... but still doesn't add up that his melee attack should own so much then.

Druid: Spells seemingly behave like shots; less damage to the back row mobs. Not sure right now if it keeps when they come to the front row because my druid has a mild case of being dead by that point (Mormont probably isn't too hard but I accidentally saved when I wanted to load so I had to make a bad fight work ). Magic shot does almost the same damage as a single target nuke.

I haven't been keeping track of monster stats but my druid's nukes against Mormont's minions (even the front row) felt quite weak. She's like 22 arcane but not terribly pimped out in gear. Maybe they just had high magic, I don't know.

What I did was to reduce the ranged/magic attack damage, to prevent what Troyen said, battles ending too quickly (a spell cast by enemy mage, two scouts hitting a single target).
Probably though I should just reduce the damage OVERALL and not on some specific skill otherwise there are issues like this.
Again you can notice this now because the party is small, in Loren was normal to get a Mage in the back killed but then there were other party members, so he could be resurrected while other kept fighting.
What I'm worried, is balancing the game to work for THREE party members when this will be the exception, not the rule
Anyway, will remove the class specific damage reductions since created problems and just do a generic damage reduction to see how it works.

Yeah well while my hunter's best move is melee attack you bet I'm gonna be noisy here

That being said his melee attack is freaking strong though.

Yes that hopefully won't happen
I've fixed it now, testing a bit here and seems good now, at least I can't find any combat weirdness anymore. Probably yesterday night was a bit too tired to reason

Not an urgent issue but why do hunters start with more skill than strength? Skill only sounds like a good attribute for hunters, especially if you played Loren.