Ah, those are very interesting thoughts. As an aside, Dungeon Siege II was precisely the game I had in mind when making the character portraits and formation mechanics. WC3 was also a major influence. Sounds like you're exactly the sort of person I made this game for!
The bats are working as intended if you didn't expect them to be tough, as this is more of the Dark Souls design influence at play. In fact, I only put the weak little wolves before them to lull the player into a false sense of security hahaha!
Regarding the difficulty curve of the tutorial level, perhaps I could sequence the encounters a bit better. I still want to hit the player with the bats right away to establish that the game is meant to be challenging, but I could go for more of an "unfolding" aspect with regards to the items. I could expand the snowy area in the northern part of the map to have some frozen skeleton enemies that are vulnerable to fire, and include the ring of frost spell as a loot drop. Then I could move the bat encounter to be unskippable, and use it to teach the player to look for additional resources on the side paths as well as spanking the newbs.
Regarding the notion of a "hardcore mode", this is why I placed about 2/3 of the encounters off of the main path, so that players are able to skip fights. Most of those little "side paths" have rewards at their end to make them worth the effort, but they are meant to be optional. I designed it in this way to introduce "risk vs greed" calculations to the scouting phase of the core gameplay loop. Perhaps I could even pander to speedrunners by placing some shortcuts in to some of those side paths...
This has been especially valuable feedback, thanks a bunch!