A few bits of advice for the early game

[Gregorovitch]

Some advice from my early game experience on hard. There are some nasty anomolous difficulty spikes in this game (which no doubt will be ironed out in successive patches, you've all turned telemetry on haven't you?) but a large part of the trouble people are having is that you can't necesarily get away with just wandering blind into encounters swinging randomly and expect to live very long in this game. Much less so than in PoE or DOS2 for example. Think hard and fight easy is the watchword here.

1 RTFJ!

Like RTFM but Journal. And read quest givers dialogs carefully too. All the hints you need to succeed in the quest will probably be there. If you ingore them you will probably die horribly. Over and over again [I'm looking at you Fangbury Cave]

2 Use your scrolls and potions!

That's what they are there for. Valerie getting wrecked by some brute of a merc? Try a scroll of Shield of Faith or a potion of Barkskin. Amiri can't get round someone to 1-shot her target quick enough? Try a scroll of Expeditious retreat – it works on the advance as well as the retreat. These things make a HUGE difference.

3 Use your scrolls and potions BEFORE combat starts

If you can of course but usually you can. Most of these things work for I minute per level at least, so pre-buffing is not just viable but in many cases necessary. Of course in early game you don't many have spells etc to do this. Later you will. But for now that's what these scrolls and potions you find for free are for. Use them. Often you will find some appropriate ones in a box or chest near the encounter in question. If you bother to look. The devs put them there specially.

4 Difficult encounter strategy #1: The Amiri “Hail Mary” Gambit

Several encounters are especially nasty becasue there is one or two enemies that are heavily armoured so you can't hit them easily or even at all in some cases and also hit like trucks therefore destroying your party.

Except Amiri can becasue of the big sword she starts with and her rage. At level 2 even against a AC25 brute she has something like a 25% chance of hitting them. On a couple of good rolls she can pretty much 1-shot anything that moves early game and that's what she's specifically built for and why she's always in your party.

You can use this to your advantage by carefully selecting her target (the biggest, badest bugger on the field, the one that's always wrecking Valerie or Harrim in a couple of shots), figuring out a way to position her for a charge against it and reloading until it works. It won't always work that's why I call it the “Hail Mary” gambit.

But when it does, rather like taking your opponents Queen in a game of chess, it dramtically changes the balance of power on the battlefield in your favour making even the most impossible looking fight feasible or even easy.

5 Difficult encounter strategy #2: Prepared expedition based campaigning

In the early game you can have quite a lot of spells available but few slots/casts per rest for them. In many encounters there will probably be one or two particualar ones that are much more effective than others for various reasons. Going into a tough fight with the right load out can make a huge difference.

In the early game it is impossible really to load out casters for all eventualities. For this reason, before you take a rest, make a hard save. Consider your next move carefully. Having selected the target for your next expedition, make the best guess you can on best information available for your loadout. Go straight to the target location, don't dally around.

If you find you've got the wrong loadout (i.e. you wish by all that is Holy you had memorised or purchased a couple of THOSE) you can reload the pre-rest save easily and change it. Or you can pop back to Oleg's and stock up on a crucial scroll or potion. This approach is big time saver and a way to make tough encounters a lot easier.