First of all, if you aren't playing on the "Hard" difficulty setting, you're feedback is going to be less useful. The problem is the Hard difficulty setting decreases your vitality (and your chance of hitting), which makes Man-at-Arms talents like "Picture of Health" less effective.
Just so people know, this is inaccurate. If anything, Picture of Health is more effective, because the game uses some rather funky math.
In Normal, you start with a +15% boost to your Vitality. After Picture of Health with Man-at-Arms 5, this becomes a +40% bonus. Going from +15% to +40% is in effect 21.7% more Vitality.
In Hard, you start with a -25% boost to Vitality. Picture of Health in this case would take that to +0%, wiping out the penalty. Going from -25% to +0% is in effect 33.3% more Vitality.
So as you can tell, it's actually a case where the bigger the Vitality penalty, the more of a proportional effect Picture of Health has.
This means that Picture of Health is actually extremely powerful in tandem with Glass Cannon. On Normal, Glass Cannon takes your character to -35% Vitality, which Glass Cannon can then bump to -10%; on Hard, Glass Cannon takes you to a devastatingly low -75%, which Glass Cannon then takes to -50%. Going from -75% to -50% is DOUBLING your Vitality! This makes Picture of Health a huge boon to any Hard character, since it transforms the extremely powerful Glass Cannon talent, adding a huge amount of durability to otherwise extremely fragile characters.
I feel the main reason players get a feeling that mages are stronger than melee is the Glass Cannon talent. Putting Glass Cannon on a front-liner seems counterintuitive; putting Glass Cannon on a backrow mage fits in with familiar RPG archetypes. However, it is really that talent which is obnoxiously overpowered, and if anything, Man-at-Arms characters are in a better position to use Glass Cannon than any other character type, thanks to Picture of Health (and, again, counterintuitively). Any character with Glass Cannon is going to BLOW AWAY a non-Glass Cannon character in terms of effectiveness -- Glass Cannon melee is hugely better than non-Glass spellcaster, and vice versa. If your entire party isn't using the talent, your party is not as strong as it could be; in Hard, it's also a fair statement to say that if your entire party isn't using Picture of Health, your party isn't as powerful as it could be (Man-at-Arms 5 is still optional, but Man-at-Arms 2/3/4 is still cheap and provides a substantial Vitality buff). It's not a spell versus attacker thing, it's a Glass Cannon versus anything else thing.
And yes, Glass Cannon + Picture of Health, in Hard, on a melee character works great. Just pump Constitution a bit, and you'll be fine.
And, as we all know, Mages can ignore the to-hit penalty Hard difficulty brings where as Warriors can not. Thus, "Hard" mode is actually harder on Warriors than it is Mages, and the balance between the two is quite different on Hard mode versus Normal or Easy (both of which actually receive a Vitality *bonus* rather than a penalty).
Although this is true, the to-hit penalty only applies against enemies who are actually eligible to dodge. Some of the best status effects Stunned, Blind, Frozen, Knocked Down allow automatic hits. When automatic hits aren't attainable, using the Bless buff often allows melee characters to attain 100% (or 90-something percent) chances to hit, anyway. This means that it's actually a somewhat rare thing for the Hard to-hit penalty to even come up, and it's safe to say that the majority of melee damage potential is unaffected. When it does come up you can't negative status the enemy, or Bless the melee then yes, it does sting, while mages never ever have to worry about it, so I agree that it's favoritism towards mages, but it's not an insurmountable thing.
