I've also enjoyed Larian's character progression, mainly because of having a whole bunch of interesting fun skills, and imo they are good at providing a strong sense of gaining in power and utility. However, their games have also seemed to suffer from some skill redundancy. Maybe this is just part of their efforts to provide lots of playstyle options and skills to try and as such this could be seen as a strength, however usually some skills are obviously 'essential' and others can seem almost worthless, at least from a power-gaming perspective (I'm not really into powergaming but I do like to make my character skill & stat choices informed by what's optimal, so I can weigh that against what I want for my character for role-playing reasons). I'd much prefer to be making more difficult choices between viable options than going I should take this, this and that if I want to be powerful, I don't need this and I don't know why anyone would take that.
In DD I felt I had to make skill choices based much more on what's optimally powerful in order to deal with the sheer amount of trash mobs everywhere. And in D2 so many skills just didn't hold any appeal to me (haven't played BD). In both games my character choices just seemed to make themselves without much delicious deciding.
I'm not a stickler for balance so I don't mind this too much in a classless system of Larian's style, I'm more concerned that we'll end up overpowered towards the end. I found this to be the case in both DD & D2. Except for a few challenging encounters here and there both games became a cakewalk after a certain point (I played D2 on nightmare, though I played DD on normal because I knew about the trash mobs clickity click and didn't think that harder difficulty would make that style of play much fun. Whatever, in both cases difficulty eventually left the country altogether except for the occasional postcard).
I'm hoping that this time having party dynamics instead of a just a single character to balance things around and especially the extra attention to hand-crafting battles that the kickstarter enabled (YAY! :-), will result in more satisfying progression and challenge throughout the whole game.
According to update 46:
"In the past, we always had the problem that we were spread too thin, and so the design and balancing of the character development systems were done almost between the soup and the potatoes. This may surprise you, but there are many many moving systems in an RPG and when you make them with a small team, you can't afford to have too much specialisation.
But now, thanks to your generous contributions, we can afford to have a team that is focussed on balancing our combat systems and tweaking the formulas that affect character development. It's a very big improvement ;)"
I'm really super interested to see how things turn out. Party-based, turn-based battles with magic-elemental-environmental interactivity in a Larian game.... oh goody
Considering the role of magic in all this fun interactivity I wonder how they will make magic not so overpowered as to far overshadow other combat playstyles.