I have found that enemies having more armors and more hp forces me to approach the fights in a different way.
With the armor system preventing most CC, some skills are stronger in Tactical difficulty - Like Teleport or frozen ground.
Calling it bloat does not change the fact that enemies not being easilly CCed makes the game more tactical. You don't just have to stand there punching them for 50% longer, you have to change up your whole strategy in a lot of fights. The way you have to use more suvival tools on the front liners lowers your damage and again makes it harder to get CC in.
Optimizing numbers are more required to be able to win at all.
Me and a friend play it blind. We don't optimize at all really. We play the archetypes we wanted from the start and since we didn't know what skills we would be able to obtain or how gear works, we haven't been able to use any of that to our advantage either, but we still do fine. We struggle with some fights - some are epic, we remember most (kudos to Larian for making most encounters that good) Finished Act1 yesterday. Tons of fun. If you know the game systems and make a party specifically to be strong, I don't think this mode (at least not act1) poses an incredible amount of challenge, so I am glad we are clueless
