Here are the reasons why the old system was changed, tom8a:

Massive Change to the Skill System

Your simple change basically will create three tiers of power:
Low Attribute Score + Low Ability Score = low-powered skill.
High Attribute Score + Low Ability Score (or vice-versa) = medium-powered skill
High Attribute Score + High Ability Score = high-powered skill

That's for each skill. Larian would have to balance the power of a skill three times over. There are 134 skills in the game.

If it's too low, it's not worth using at all. Maybe that's not a big deal, but the bigger issue to me seems to be balancing medium-power with high-power. Plus, I'm generalizing, because you expect that each point into an attribute and an ability should mean something, right?


Your more radical change of increasing ability points is unlikely to happen. It was changed away from that because it was leading to more unbalanced situations - some people would pump a ton of points into one ability only, others would spread them out.

More points leading to smoother character progression was already tried in the alpha, and it was considered to be false.