Magic is ridiculously overpowered and needs to be toned down for a proper balance.
In my first ever playthrough of BG1 and BG2, I picked a sorcerer and steamrolled over every boss with ease, especially in BG2.
Once I learned Chain Contingency, which can be fired without any delays, I simply loaded 3 skulltrap or 3 sunfire for those with magic resistance and fired it with enemy sighted condition. When 2 CC became available, 6 skulltraps, 3 abidalzim's horrid wiltings + 3 skulltraps, or 3 lower resistance + 3 skulltrap was enough to finish any fights in 3 secs.
It resulted in my sorcerer, who wasn't even soloing, slaying every single dragon and Messisan single-handly in less than 1 second with core difficulty. (the final stage of TOB fight was over in 1 sec, no exaggeration lol) Even before the enemy boss's scripted defense spells were fired, they took 300~400 damages and was out. even if they got their defense up, 3 Pierce Shield immediately followed by attacking spells in 0.1 sec delay put them down.
You can fire 5 CC with 15 spells loaded in 1 sec, no restrictions or whatsoever. And i'm not even done when talking about the OP spell mechanic if you know what i'm saying. Time stop is ridiculous, a set of CCed skulltrap does 20d6 *3 to max of 360 damage, and with improved alacrity and defense spells, your spellcaster, especially a sorc, can beat the entire game without taking 1 hp loss if you are carefull enough.(haven't accomplished it since this was my first run ever, but I think it's totally possible) and there are so many cheese like imrpoved invisibility + spell immunity combo which renders enemy spell casters useless.
I heard BG:EE is not including SCS(which is unfortunate because while they didn't change spells much the improved AI deals with player spell casters rather effectively), if so they should at least do spell overhaul or otherwise this game's battles will be boring as Monday morning for experienced players.
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As for Melissan, did you play without Ascension? Otherwise she shouldn't even be down to 50% after 3-400 damage, assuming it'd even get through.
Either way, even with mods to boost the difficulty and the slider on insane there will still be many ways of cheesing your way through the game without a whole lot of effort if you try. If you don't find it fun to erase all enemies with CC barrages, then simply refrain from doing so, just like players who want to keep battles vs enemy casters/beholders interesting won't equip the Cloak of Mirroring/Shield of Balduran, etc.
The main issue is that BG don't take in account physical skills besides the HLA skills (high level abilities that you get per level up after 3.000.000 xp points). Fighters should be able to knockdown an enemy (interrupting a mage's cast), bards should be able to disrupt spell castings with their songs (or bad noises), and therefore on.
Magic problem is that it's very well worked in comparison to other raw possibilities that never get an touch on the subject.
I have to echo other sentiments here -- SCS with pre-buffing enemy mages, smarter AI, better calls for help, and improved end chapter battles makes the fights *much* more difficult, even on core.
The magic system in BG2 is the best thing about the game. Everything else nowadays that listens to the 'ZOMG this is OP, that is UP, nerf this, buff this, change this do that wah wah wah' ends up being a totally rubbish game.
Look at Dragon Age Origins - the magic system in that game was incredibly powerful, and every other class was completely gimped in comparison to spell casters. All the typical complainers did nothing but whine and whinge about it but they didnt listen and left the lovely overpowered magic system alone.
And thats how it should be. One simply cannot swing a sword, fire a bow or backstab at the same amount of power as a level 9 mage spell. Magic is ... magic. Its uber and powerful and burns everything to a crisp. Swords just stab things, they arent meant to compare.
Hmmm, I might have to play DAO again now.
Besides, if you find this magic too powerful try beating the game as an invoker or transmuter! That is more of a challenge.
Maybe I just suck at playing mages though.
Spells *are* that powerful in pen-and=paper AD&D as well, the only difference is that pnp requires "material components" , which balances things a bit (you need diamond dust to cast stoneskin!)
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It simply needs to forbid resting inside dungeons, or in places where it would be impossible to rest properly and prepare yourself to have your spells.
And if you're a smartass who goes outside to rest and then back in - respawn.
There, problem fixed
Hard: Enforce camping supply requirements - Unless you have food in your inventory, you cannot rest. Rest too much? Go back to town, enjoy your repopulated dungeon for the time it takes. Want to spam rest? Fill yourself up with rations, costing you money, weighing you down and preventing you from filling up with treasure instead.
Either way, Magic is ridiculously overpowered; by high levels you're literally Wishing for objective reality to change to suit you better. That's just D&D.
Since magic have such a strong presence in Faerûn, I see overpowered magic as a flavor in the setting. Playing a truly powerful wizard should make you feel like a god among mere mortals, and DnD really succed in that aspect. Just look at Irenicus for gods sake.
This is not saying mages shouldn't have bane. A well coordinated backstab, or an archer spraying 10 arrows per round, will make any wizard feel uncomfortable.
Oh, and my dual-classed Kensai/Thief dished out around 300 damage per hit with the assassination ability, 5 attacks per round without haste, isn't THAT being overpowered?! But that's because you're a seriously unbalanced dude, dammit. :P
You dont really have to use a spell combination that makes the fight a cakewalk, instead try to find diffrent ways to deal with the dangers you face, atleast for me thats part of the fun when i make another playthrough (damn you character creation screen, your to hard to pass:< ).
And sometimes i just enjoy doing a "bow to me, pathetic human" playthrough with a godlike build
As far as magic goes, in the hands of a novice player, magic is not overwhelmingly powerful. Experienced players who understand how the magic system works, know what to expect form enemies, and are willing to invest the time and effort in careful and tedious preparation (memorize spell sequencers and triggers, rest, cast triggers and sequencers, memorize different spells, rest, approach enemy, cast a bunch of buffs, enter combat, win, repeat the entire process with the next foe) instead of playing more like an adventure where you respond to threats spontaneously, magic can easily dominate the game. But you don't have to play like that. You can limit your use of magic, decline to use items like the cloak of mirroring or robe of Vecna which effectively remove entire classes of challenge from the game, and play the game in a way that doesn't allow your characters to take advantage of your meta-knowledge of what's coming next and what their strengths and weaknesses are.
Meta-knowledge makes the biggest difference. For example, Kangaax is pretty easy to defeat once you know how he works, but if you didn't know that (a) he was going to turn into a demi-lich and (b) what a demi-lich can do, you are probably going to have your party wiped out, or at least a good many of them imprisoned before you have to run away and prepare to come back and fight him, now knowing what he can do.
BG HLA skills already made a proof that physical abilities are compatible with this game, so why not some common abilities?
In other words, you not only have to roll and build a high-level mage, you have to spend hours and hours of real-life time studying the spells from manuals and websites, and thinking about spells, and having creative flashes of insight about new combos and spell strategies that might be effective.
Many players are not patient enough to go through this process. They just want to click and kill. In fact, a lot of newer players actually complain that the BG spell system is too hard to learn.
So, if you've spent the time and thought to figure out how to be a BG godlike uebermage, then you should be proud of your accomplishment.
That's why BG is such a great game. It's not "dumbed down" in any way. If you have figured out how to beat the game, you have a well-deserved feeling of pride. Rather than, yay, I clicked 10,000 times and won, and I got to see lots of pretty graphics.
If you still want a greater challenge after that, then maxing the difficulty slider and adding SCS is the way to go. But be warned, there are lots of no-reload players out there who have so much knowledge and experience, that they can solo the BG trilogy with any character class, with maximum difficulty and maxed-out SCS. If you reach that kind of grandmastery of the game, all you can do is to start playing with self-imposed handicaps.
I think it's super that we have a game here where we could actually have rankings, like in chess. Novice, expert, master, grandmaster, for example. Not that we really need to do that, but I just think it's really fun that we can use the BG trilogy as almost a lifetime hobby, as though it were our chess.
Second, in CRPGs, all characters are basically fighters. Mages are just magical fighters. In PnP games, there was a lot of stuff to do besides fighting, and no party could come anywhere close to fighting all of the enemies that games like Baldur's Gate throw at them and survive. (The fact that BG monsters all get maximum hit points, which is twice as much as they are supposed to have on average makes it even more outrageous from a PnP perspective). In a PnP game, your mages would spend a lot of spell slots on spells meant either to avoid combat or for non-combat purposes, but in BG, you use virtually all of your allotted spell slots to turn your mage into a 24x7 killing machine. Spells that were primarily non-combat in the PnP game, such as charm, are converted into combat spells in BG. (In the PnP game, charm person made the target think of you as a trusted and loyal friend; in compute games, it turns the target into a mindless automaton who willingly attacks his former comrades, something the PnP game more or less says the spell can't make it do.)