I suspect that developers know that many gamers who buy RPGs will just choose a warrior, find a big sword and some half-decent armour, and get hacking without ever worrying too much about the rest of the stuff. And you can't really afford to have too many of your paying customers getting terminally stuck half way through the game just because they neglected their Shadow resistance in favour of Fire, or just didn’t rate the importance of Initiative highly enough. So for "play balance" reasons they make the effects pretty minimal. They also know that it costs extra time and money to build a game that has any genuine path divergence.
Then, my friend, if you to that you'll be just another person who took Divinity for a Diablo clone.
It is not.
Initiative is very important. Like in D&D 3+ rules, it decides who attacks first.
The resisstances can be often modified with items and crystals. They are too not to be underestimated. Also, note that you cannot directly modify the resisstances one by one.
I would disagree with you if you say that BD is over-stuffed with useless junk-stats.
Now the arrows:
My Deathknight has Elemental Curse - Water in addition to his Water projectile spell.
I use water arrows.
So when I curse some hapless monster, both my magic and my arrows work much better than normally. The water arrows deal additional damage and the water projectiles hack away big chunks of health. I don't see a problem with that.
Peace.
-Basil.
