Nah he is not harder to romance, let him suck your blood and pat his back to make him burp after and he will rip the clothes of your body. He is similar to Shadowhearth where he is open to advance the relationship after certain story/personal quest events. If you keep in mind that he values power and self preservation above all else he is easy to please.
I think most gamers playing this game are white hetero males in the age bracket of 20-40 who rather stab a uppety gay rogue between the eyes than invest time in him. Most times Astarion find his demise is at the first camp event or sold to the witcher(like i did). If he was instead a 50 year old female with a raspy smokers voice and the patron of a whorehouse it would be romance number 2.
I agree with you that the whole vampire personal quest line is one of the most enjoyable and interesting if not the most. To bad he is disapproving of most of my dialog choices, otherwise i would change him with the river-dancing nigger in a heartbeat, who is very, very, boring.
I barely used wyll in my first playthrough and he is not available in my second playthrough since I destroyed the groove , but I came across a thread claiming Wyll is boring and then I began thinking about how the other party members I didn't use that playthrough (Karlach and Gale) had interesting personalities, storylines and moments which made me go out of my way to complete their personal quests. I still did Wyll's questline but my god he is bland, how can you make a guy who sold his soul to a devil and is the son of a noble so damn boring? Was he a late addition or afterthought after they realized there were no black characters?
Did anyone else check the crystal ball in The Devil's Fee after killing Raphael? It shows Mephistopheles, his dad, about to eat him. Fucked up. Really fun fight btw.
The Iron Throne, on the other hand, can suck a fat one. I went through that shit at least eight times trying to get everyone out alive and just couldn't do it. I think I only lost two of the Gondians but it was still frustrating. Damn Sahuagin.
I would say it is easy if you use haste and trap the sahuagins with the doors but even then I struggled to get everyone out: the first time I played very badly but still managed to save the duke, omellum and a few gondians. I later reloaded to see if I could save everyone, even using the smoke detector trick i read about online yet I struggled to get 2-3 gondians on board despite hasting them, had to savescum HARD to get them in, think I ended up using two casts of dimension's door or omellum to get them on board.
I bet the devs knew how obnoxious that was and thus decided against adding an achiement for saving everyone.
Now the one segment that legit made me upset was the forge, for the following reasons:
-I sneaked in from the roof and ignored the gondians on the first floor, thus they died, the ones in the basement got all killed and using speak dead I was told only the blind guy could destroy the place, who i remind you was already dead.
-I arrived to moonrise AFTER freeing nightsong and so all the gnomes despawn/are killed, meaning no gnomes to help me in act 3 DESPITE HELPING ALL OF THEM IN ACT 1
Now I had to reload and save the gondians on the first floor of the forge so I may be wrong about this: but if you do both things I mentioned above you're left with no way to disable the steel watch.
For all the "larian thought of everything!!!!" Thats a pretty shitty oversight, again I may be wrong but is not like I went around murdering every npc who could have saved me.
I hope the definitive edition brings changes to the forge segment since it is so poorly done
