It was especially awful how, spoiler alert:
the endgame reveal is it was ultimately a bad thing if you gain source from anything other than a puddle or a vat, when the game basically gave you no other way short of very limited source orbs until Act IV.
What do you mean endgame reveal?
This was directly told to you the very moment you unlocked source capabilities. As well as reiterated many, many, many, many times throughout various dialogue encounters with spirits. Potentially even causing companions to get angry with you and leave due to the nature of it.
All of that glazing being said, it is far from without flaws. DOS2's combat is BRUTALLY UNFORGIVINGLY EVIL. Shout "skill issue" all you want but I genuinely could not beat DOS2 on its standard difficulty without enabling the gift bag feature for bedrolls to heal outside of combat. Unless you cheese the trading system Act I felt basically unplayable since there were no viable healing options out the gate and I was regularly running out of revive scrolls.
Ehh? You quite literally have a class that gets a heal skill at level 1. With how ridiculously easy multi-class is, you can equip your entire party with heal + both armour restoration skills to heal up.
That said, there are some incredibly unforgiving aspects to the game. Notably electrified surfaces which will perma-stun any character lacking magic armour (There's a particular ambush in Act 2 near the bloke who dropped his wedding ring that TPK'd me due to this particular thing, where they in 1 turn wiped out my entire parties magic armour which left them perma-stunned for the entire fight due to electrified surface...)
The game is ripe with absurd difficulty spikes & level gates without even warning you at all or giving you any real indication. You can be walking along a path and 20 steps later suddenly be assaulted by an enemy 2-4 levels higher than you, which is more often than not a death sentence. The area layout, especially in Act II, is far from good. The entire region is a huge open map, but isn't structured in a way that encourages the player to approach levelled enemies in an order that the player can actually face.
Honestly, I never encountered such a thing. In fact, I ended up using a mod that causes enemies to scale UPWARDS (Including scaling them several levels higher than me) as a result, because naturally it's easy to end up outleveling everything you encounter. Especially when just following quests you encounter (Even without companion quests, as I originally played Lone Wolf as just me and my wife Lohse)
Keep in mind, that I only ever played on the hardest difficulty.
2) The class balancing is very not balanced. For my custom character I was doing a fighter greatswored melee build the entire game and it basically took me until the final moments of Act III for it to finally become somewhat useful, and towards the latter half of Act IV it just skips straight into overpowered territory.
3) Trying to "multiclass" is more often than not just screwing yourself over. Even within the same class trying to level up multiple types of skills (air vs lightning or fire vs earth as two examples) will often just be ruining your ability to do anything because the level of enemies & their sheer amount of health & armour means if you aren't maximizing your potential into a specific line you WILL struggle heavily to actually do anything to them.
It's more the opposite really. The game HEAVILY rewards multiclassing. Since quite a lot of the best skills are the rank 1-3 ones. Beyond that there's mostly just the more situational Source skills which are limited in availability because of Source. As well as some rank 5 multi-school skills that are pretty good (Which you know, is more reward for multi-classing)
So just grabbing a lot of these skills ends up providing more rounded characters while hyperfocusing leaves you with bugger all because of how little you get outside rank 1-3. This is even more apparent if you do try to make a "Fighter" or "Rogue" character because even of the rank 1-3 skills there's only like 1 that's actually good in each class (Thus you end up going Warfare + Scoundrel + Polymorph anyway just to get a few physical skills worth anything)
This is reinforced with literally every companion starting class innately being dual class. It's the game outright telling you "Hey, you should be multiclassing"
Armour Class to me always felt like a very lazy "my number is higher so you're more likely to miss or your attack does nothing", and that sucks. DOS2's physical & magical armour system was far from greatness, but being able to still actually do something to your enemy even if they had resistances was a huge breath of fresh air after countless "Missed!" rolls of absurdity in BG3 as well as actual D&D.
AC is the way it is because of TT gaming. The simple nature of it, plus the penchant for misses, works well for Tabletop. It makes it easy to factor in so that people can focus on playing the game rather than calculating combat and in TT failure is actually interesting because the DM gets to decide consequences (Including them being able to mitigate bad luck. I.e. If you keep missing your attack rolls, they can make your fumbled attack go and strike another target instead)
It's just it doesn't transition well into video games because the lack of an actual DM to fudge things or make failures funny means that bad streaks just feel bad (Same is also true for skill checks)
That said, I'm fond of how AC incorporates actual defences from a logical perspective. AC involves both the ability to evade (Which is where Dex modifiers come from) as well as armour being able to deflect/absorb incoming blows (Which is where Heavy Armour's high base AC comes from). As opposed to "I have some weird magical shield granted by this special pair of socks I'm wearing".
In regards to DOS2's armour system, yeah, no it was utter trash. Between it providing status immunity (Making most skills worthless) and pushing you into singular damage type party set ups (Because having everyone focus down the same armour type is just flat out better than having some chip away at physical armour and some chip away at magical armour as you only need to remove one armour type to damage red health)
If I would be given the chance to, I'd suggest a middleground of the two where we keep physical/magical armour but instead of them being an immunity to status effects just have them be a damage resistance from that damage type.
Interestingly, this is what the Divinity Unleashed mod does in DoS2. It replaces armour being separate health pools and turns them into damage resistances. Reworking skills and effects into being more balanced for always applying (I.e. Electrified Surfaces no longer stun, they instead daze). With stuff like the Armour restoration skills being buffs.
Of course, if you do play with this, you do still see that this armour system still isn't "Great" it's just massively improved over base DOS2 armour system which is utter trash.
Notably, it doesn't really create any sort of dynamic gameplay with skill selection... You just build your characters to do a certain thing and then you do that thing irregardless of what armour values the target has. Which is in part, due to the nature of DOS2's skills and their lack of any mechanics to capitalise on this (It also cripples some skills, like that Scoundrel skill that normally is interesting because it bypassed armour just... Doesn't do anything special in this mod and is literally no different to just using a regular attack)
Really what is warranted is a system that isn't so restrictive as "Armour as extra health pools" but is more interactive than "Everyone just has passive damage resistance" so that gameplay can revolve around exploiting weaknesses or trying to debuff strengths.
Baldur's Gate 3's surfaces & materials are… better in almost every aspect compared to DOS2.
Ehh... BG3 has the whole "Wet > Lightning/Cold Damage" thing which is quite stupid. I'll take everything being on fire (Which I can Bless to turn into Blessed Fire) over "Here's a ridiculously easy way to get a 2x damage amplification"
BG3 also suffers from the same issue as DOS2 when it comes to surfaces. Which is EVERYTHING CREATES ONE. Especially the absolutely dumb mechanic of being hit = blood surface at your feet (Which is so incredibly good at absolutely ruining every notion of actually using surfaces. Be it in BG3 where Fire or Acid surfaces are instantly replaced by blood or in DOS2 where the entire battlefield just becomes Electrified Blood)
I've made note of this thing before in my feedback in other threads that approach this topic, but there should be segregation of skills that explicitly create/exploit surfaces rather than the mechanic shoehorned into every ability in the game.
There should be a clear tactical decision to use a skill to create a surface. Which would limit surface spam that plagues DOS and BG3, while opening up more options for builds and tactical decisions (Especially with more interactions and combinations than even DOS2 has with its surface and mists)
With this also extending to enemies too, so most enemies don't make surfaces, but select ones will. Creating more diverse encounters where some will warrant playing around surfaces (Such as that encounter in DOS2 with the tar slugs and that guy you try to save) while most will not have you being spammed with surfaces.
A footnote I can’t figure to fit anywhere else, another clear lesson learned & massive improvement in Baldur’s Gate 3 over DOS2 was simply the physical space for movement & combat. It was a constant frustration in DOS2 how many clearly open sightlines were blocked, or how a prop took up a padded space around it that it clearly didn’t visibly take up, harsh cornering, and etc making some encounters absolute agony to deal with. This is also coupled with physical interactivity being a much stronger core of Baldur’s Gate 3 over DOS2. Pushing/shoving, jumping, verticality, and generally much better navigation & ability sightlining are all amazing over DOS2. I missed these severely when playing it.
But having played DOS2 I can now see the exact points where criticism came from that lead to both extremely good corrections but also strong overcorrections within BG3.
To be fair, a lot of the changes in BG3 is due to having to be based around the D&D ruleset.
The use of AC, the toning down of surfaces (Which don't exist in D&D and was homebrewed into the game because Larian likes them), the use of Standard/Bonus/Reaction actions over AP etc. It's all because BG3 has to use D&D and specifically 5e rules.
As a long term D&D and Larian fan, it's very easy to see all the places where Larian have homebrewed in some aspects of their design into BG3, to the point where BG3 is actually a terrible D&D game because of the excessive homebrew (While being a watered down Larian game due to the D&D systems they were forced to include)
It's what makes me very curious at to how Divinity will turn out, a title where they have total freedom to do their own thing without D&D's systems. Both in terms of what they learned after DOS2, but also what (If anything) they might incorporate from the D&D systems they were forced to use in BG3.
