Then there's the fact that balance is all over the place and there's no real sense of progression or even a cohesive direction to the skills you can learn, etc.
The feeling of each school is the same. AOE all day long.
You could start balancing when your corner stones are on place, but now they are still missing. A specification of each school is not here.
BTW : Your ideas of soft cc are good. I was thinking similar. Current skill set has too many hard cc. There should be focus for fun cc like Mute spells, Cripple char so he cant execute skills, pinned by arrow so he cant walk(but can skill/spell), push or pull enemy a meter away get them to proper floor, proper blind, ... so many fun things. Disable a character for a round is stupid.
