The writer finds the combat tedious? I think it’s amazing! Sometimes you stomp a horde of weak enemies, sometimes you come up with a clever strategy to face overwhelming odds, sometimes you fight a tense battle where the enemies get lucky and you use more resources than expected, and once in a while you get stomped because you made a really bad decision or the enemies got really lucky.

Unlike them, I have not found combat on Balanced difficulty to be quick-savey. I’m 90 hours in and I think the only time I’ve saved during combat was when I was trying to brainstorm ways to move a nonlethally knocked-out NPC out of an impending AoE without killing them. (The answer was Shove, btw, it always succeeds on unconscious targets, but be aware of cliffs. Throwing them, on the other hand, will deal 1 damage and murder them.) I have, I think, 2 combat Game Overs, and one of them was on a fight that the game telegraphs as being wildly imbalanced and tries pretty hard to discourage you from engaging in at all; I still went back and won it on the next try, once I had a better idea of what I would be dealing with. Once you are out of the early game and have a few levels under your belt, you should have all the tools you need to control the course of fights.