I agree that right now, there's something off about Talents. You get those every other level, for a total of 2 + 9 = 11 Talents. There are 36 Talents to choose from, however, only a select few will appeal to any particular build. I'm at level 9 for my current party and I've acquired the ones that work the best, and I'm wondering, "now what".
I'm trying to avoid the easy no-brainers like "Bigger and Better" and "All Skilled Up" that are build-neutral, but I've already picked up most or all of the build-specific ones.
Reducing how often you get them is one idea, but another is simply to increase how many Talents you have to choose from. I think the game needs closer to 50 Talents. I'm not saying to add them in before release, but maybe a couple months afterwards, you could make a "Skills + Talents Pack" patch that adds in additional skills and Talents.
I also think that choice of talents now does not really have a big consequence since you can acquire so many of them. The schedule now might be a little bit too tight to add more talents (it is by the way a great idea for an expansion!) but reducing how often we get them could really help with the issue. Let us for example start with just one talent and get one talent point every 5 levels. So, we can maybe get just 5 talents in total and the choice suddenly starts to really matter.
A few other thoughts on particular talents:
The zombie talent is a very cool and useful one. However, it does not really have any downsides. The zombie character can heal infinitely while standing in a poison pool, the scarce supply of healing potions and food can now be divided between other party members. And the most important point: the undead mages usually cast poison darts and not healing spells - thus they can not really harm the zombie character.
What does the packmule talent do? Does it just increase the weight of items you can carry? If this is so, then it is pretty useless. I pick up the items only with my very weak witch (strength 5) and have not run into any difficulties with weight limit yet. If this should happen, I still have a few other characters for additional inventory space. You can also store items in your shelter plane and so on...
