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You cannot mean you missed the most important tactic missing in BD, can you?

In diablo and many other games a ranged specialist do can the Shoot and Run tactic.
In this game it's not even possible to protect your wizard with your death knight, once an opponent has targetted your wizard.
And it's not the AI that is being smart here: enemies just target the closest PC.
If it's the wizard then you have a problem. You cannot outrun your opponent nor do your enemies receive an attack of opporunity, if they run past your knight towards your wizard (like they would in NWN or TOEE).
That is annoying.

I never had a problem with that. Firstly, I always tried to keep the Warrior in front (atmitidly tricky sometimes). Secondly, if my Wizard or Ranger is targetted by a melee enemy, I make him run and have the Warrior chase the assailant. That seems to work.

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Other tactics: in diablo you have to target shamans before devils for example, because the shamans keep raising the fallen. On the other hand you need to attack devils to reach the shaman if you play a melee type.

Now you can have a ranged and a melee character. The melee protects your ranged while they pick off the summoner.

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There's only one fight in the demo with more than 2 creatures (normal difficulty) and that's the fight near the kitchens. And they didn't even include a spellcaster to complicate matters. Here it's just a matter of talking them all out one at a time. Not very exciting.

There's a couple of crossbow-men in that room, but you're right, not particularly tricky.

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What also bothered me was that elemental damage types didn't seem make any difference in combat. Even in diablo you have to pick the right weapon to get past damage resistancies.

They didn't in the demo. Although I noticed that the ghosts seemed immune to my Air attacks (and possibly the other three elements too).

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In this game it's really no more than click at opponent once with knight selected and then select main character and repeat. Maybe drink one potion during combat and you win. Not very exciting.
Compare to diablo where you have to dodge fireballs while shooting and running. Or compare to NWN where you need to buff your PC with spells and potions and worry about DCs, reflex saves, ABs, spell resistancies, disjunctions, etc.

It will get trickier. I agree that the demo was a poor representation of the game. But having played Divine Divinity through, I know there are a lot more tactical areas. And with the improvements in Beyond Divinity they can only be better now.

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I'm pretty sure the devs could have thought up some difficult encounters and hand out some required scrolls and buffs necessary to win the fight, but they didn't do so in this demo.

I just thought. Try the Divine Divinity demo. It's probably a better representation of what Beyond Divinityp has to offer! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/delight.gif" alt="" />

The other thing with Beyond Divinity is that it's meant to appeal to a wide audience. It's not just hack-and-slash, but it can be. It has RPing, but it's mostly optional. The harder puzzles are optional and provide bonuses and additional quests. It was an interesting way to make a game, and it caused it's own problems, but it worked quite well for Divine Divinity. I think Divine Divinity was the best thing since Quest for Glory. I'm looking forward to see what Beyond Divinity has to offer.