My biggest complaint about the Talents in D:OS was that there were just too darn few of them. This was especially notable for magic-users who often ran out of useful Talents at the halfway point of the game.
From what I hear, unfortunately, the EE has not added many more (and what new ones do exist may just be for grenades and wands), they've just "rebalanced" what was there. What that means, I don't know.
I thought there were a lot of cool talents that customized your character a lot, actually. Some of them were boring, maybe more than 50% of them even, but a lot of them were serious gamechangers: Glass Cannon, Zombie, Lone Wolf, Quickdraw, and even Pet Pal are massive, and things like Leech, Five Star Diner, Bully, Elemental Affinity, and Walk it Off were neat, both for roleplaying value and changing playstyles, though balance wasn't always right (some OP, some UP).
Some of them, though, were game-changers in ways you might not care for. Glass Cannon is great if you can consistently keep the weak characters out of danger, but if your playstyle does not revolve around shutting the enemy completely down, it's dangerous. Zombie is another iffy trait, because poison damage is not great on enemies, and healing spells tend to be pretty good on players. Lone Wolf obviously has some disadvantages as well.
Leech had the very odd trait of your own blood, leaving your own body, can heal yourself, and if an ally inflicted bleeding on you, it was an full heal. Five Star Diner is garbage because doubled food healing is even worse garbage than healing potions (which were also garbage). Elemental Affinity was a neat concept, but extremely situational since most of the surfaces were things you didn't want to stand in.
For me, Walk It Off was bad because of the reduced effectiveness of buffs. Having a "trade-off" for Walk It Off killed any benefit or interest in getting that Talent.
Some talents are extremely class-specific, like Back Stabber and Opportunist or talents with high requirements, which is fine, but a lot could be used by any class. If they reworked around half of the current talents and added 10-20 more, we'd be in a really solid place with talents I think. Not sure what they've done with talents for the EE.
Backstabber is one of those things which has been with the game so long that people never really stopped to think about it. It's literally required if you want to use daggers, because otherwise their damage output is negligible. But making it a Talent basically means Rogues get one less choice about what Talents to take.
I do kind of agree that talents should usually be tradeoffs so it's not necessarily a no-brainer to get something like Quickdraw. I mean, it'd be cool if it reduced AP cost of ranged weapons by one, but it lowered your crit chance or something. So if you wanted to go for deadly power shots, it's not necessarily the best talent.
Sometimes Talents having Trade-offs is fine, and makes sense, but not ALL the time. There are a bunch of Talents whose usefulness is killed because of having a downside, and I can't imagine how much worse the Talent situation would be in D:OS if they all had a downside.
Walk It Off was bad entirely because of the penalty to buff duration. Demon and Ice King were not great Talents in the first place, but the downside made them less than worthless.
