What? DOS1 is completely easymode if you just put 1 geomancer on every character and oil/fire the entire planet every fight - partly because it also causes line of sight issues. In fact the best characters you can make in that game are a result of putting just 1 or 2 points into each spell school. There wasn't much of a reason to spend 7 extra skill points to go up to level 4 and get a master skill plus a few adepts when you could get 13 more novice + 4 more adept skills at the same cost. The only real exception is Rain of Arrows, but that's fine because special arrows is almost the same as having 1-2 points into every skill tree anyways.
It's also really easy to group enemies in DOS1 as it is in DOS2. It's just called walking back at the start of a fight and making them chase you and converge to a point, and then using Teleportation to control things even further. Bottleneck points always exist.
Some definite rose colored glasses going on: DOS1 is beatable with pretty much just oil+fire spam for 95% of the fights in the game. By the time it stops being super effective your team is getting like 17 AP per turn and some of your characters should be pushing like 65% block and 80-120% all resist, making them completely invincible.
Getting CCed in DOS2 isn't even that bad when again, with very few points, you can effectively remove and then further prevent any/all CCs that can happen to you. There are also a LOT more heal spells in this game. In fact the healing is pretty fucking insane in this game. You can throw virtually any surface underneath your characters and then bless it. Hell you can even heal a LOT just from doing damage. There's also AOE heals, heal over times (that remove some debuffs), persistent area heals (that also remove statuses), percent heals (that also remove statuses). Armor buffs not only refills your armor, it also increases your maximum armor, and removes debuffs, and makes you immune to debuffs for a time.
Getting CCed once and losing a fight is based on poor team building. Wear a shield, have points in Leadership or Perseverance, use frost armor/fortify/heals on characters, skip 'lolWits must attack with big sword hope I win fast ideas' and build a proper team. You either won't get CCed in the first place or it won't matter because you can remove it with another character. This just happens when people build for Wits and then wonder why their team is a one trick pony - they either win in the first round or they quickly lose thereafter. It's not very hard to make a team that is actually invincible in this game
