Goodness ok here we go.
I've also lived without using rain; didn't bother with it at all unless I was being particularly impatient on classic difficulty.
Going without rain means you often have to remove obstacles by waiting a lot of extra time and would often mean taking full fire damage.
My point about Rain is that it is the only combo I use because Rain is useful on its own, in fact a detriment not to have (Or its cousin Blood Rain). Not that you couldn't live without it.
Your skills in the current build can shore up the differences from neglecting your primary attribute for quite awhile as well as picking up the right combos along the way or simply having extra abilities to make up for the deficit. All your abilities scale upwards with you anyways and the penalties are to offset that. So you can be several levels behind and still be competitive.
Some of them do that. However attributes remain the largest effect on your current combat effectiveness.
A Single point of constitution means a lot more then the 5th dot of Vitality (In fact the most useful dot is the first).
Zone control isn't useless; it can be exploited depending on how much of a scum bag you are or simply it can be used for CCing while reserving your larger spells to deal with more troublesome foes or if you're in an endurance fight it can also help out as well since most of your spells by that point are on cool down depending on your party composition.
Here is kind of the thing
1) Enemies can move much MUCH further then they could in the first game and often have teleports in some way. It is rare that enemies will not be able to reach you in a single turn
-I'll add to that, Ranged attacks are POWERFUL in this game. In fact they are often just as powerful as melee attackers, or even more powerful.
2) Enemies with armor or magic armor can ignore it
3) Zone control is a lot less powerful then it is before.
4) Enemies can also clear zoning, corrupt it, or benefit from it.
As soon as enemies close the distance your attempt at zone control is pretty much over except for possibly a teleport.
If you're interested in gaining more power you're going to need memory one way or another.
Yes, the game makes that painfully clear. No one was disputing that.
