I agree. I think the various talents have way too little weight right now. And with equipment to buff certain stats like loremaster or crafting just for the very moment you need them kind of discourage the player to put skills in them. Same problem raises from the tons of money you can get by stealing which leads to you having no problem to pay for identifying and repairing which makes loremaster and and blacksmithing completely pointless...
At the moment there is way too little incentive to invest your skill and stat points in stuff not directly needed for combat. I fully agree with you here. But instead of making enemies just harder (which is of course an option, but not the best one imo) Larian should try to make the single skills and stats and talents more useful or their lack more painful.
That's not only true for non-combat skills and stats but also for combat skills. A warrior who only invests points in strength shouldn't be able to hit with more than 50% of his blows at best, maybe way less. And certain skills should have longer cooldown times and cost more action points or make less damage.
The biggest problem with the cooldown system is that each and every skill is available at the very start of each combat situation. There is no "starting cooldown". So a fully-strenght maximized warrior could easily use his best combat skill in the first turn, his second best in the second turn and so on. Following this route most enemies will be slain in the first two or three turn, like described below. Same is true for mages and every other class as well. In the old Infinity engine games this problem was (partially) solved by casting times. Using the most dangerous skills and spells forced you to skip X turns/seconds for casting. During that casting time you were vulnerable and had to be defended by other party members. This system led to a more balanced way of fighting and using skills/spells. You had to ponder which skill/spell to use in which situation. This system was additionally fueled by spells disappering from your pool of available skills until the next rest. You don't have that flexibility or "balanced" system with cooldown. With that system you can just use all your most powerful spells in turn 1 which maybe even leads to kill the most powerful enemy in the very first turn or the second one. This is a big weakness of the system and Larian should think about some "safetly measures" or improvements here.
Why not inventing casting/preparation times/turns as well for high-level spells and skills?
So, in fact I don't think you missed out that much. But that's also the problem. Because you SHOULD miss out stuff with characters only leveled for combat and maximum damage...if that's not the case the whole stats/skills/talents/leveling system is fundamentally broken at a very basic level imo.
