I think that in general, there is a problem with the mechanics:
- You have a limit to skills within a specific school.
- You have no limit the the number of overall skills or skill schools in the game.
- You have a cool-down for individual skills.
- All other skills are unaffected.
This encourages multiskilling, but I don't feel that this achieves that in an organic way. Multiskilling just to get extra skill slots feels kind of broken.
It's fine that they've decided to avoid the mana mechanic, but the benefit of mana is that it's fairly easy to balance regardless of how many spells a character has.
By relying on cool-downs as this mechanic, it's much more important to manage the number of skills available to the character at any time. (There's no point having a cool-down on one overpowered skill, if you've got 10 others ready to use.) This would be why they've gone with the new limitations on the number of skills in the Enhanced Edition. But as I said, this feels like an imperfect solution.
I think that they are planning to review the cost mechanic for spells. It sounds like they're planning to greatly expand the number of available skills/spells in D:OS2, so unless they severely limit the number of skills we can have at one time (which would not be fun), they will have to find different strategies for balancing this. The plan to reduce the amount of AP in D:OS2 may be part of this balancing act.
***Resurrection
Speaking of resurrection -- I think there are some mistakes they made with that specific skill:
The standard resurrection mechanic should be non-combat. Like, maybe you have to carry your KO'd companion back to a temple for healing. Or otherwise, it just relies on you performing an action you can only do outside of combat.
The witchcraft spell should be unique in that you're able to use it
during combat, so there is a distinct advantage to using it over the normal mechanic.
