Grab a legendary crossbow with some warfare + huntsman gear and you will see why chicken combo is bleh. The merchant that sells lute, once persuaded, always restock with a legendary bow or xbow (and later, divine) every hour of your level so it's very easy to get.
And for the combo, you still need to break the armor first so for the combo to be usable, you will need outside helps as I really doubt a single knife stab will break the physical shield. When you consider that you had to use 4 AP on a char with no armor or minimal armor for it to actually work, it's rather meh. You're better off using with something like using 2 AP for a knockdown and the other 2 AP to work on the other enemies as a perma cc'd enemies are considered to be as good as dead and just give you more free actions before the enemies can act especially if their turns come earlier.
The freeroam nature of Act 2 also makes it impossible to balance the curve as players are given choices to do whatever area they want first and get levels/gears as long as they can clear it. You can be level 15 and go do level 13 quests or vice versa. There's only one real bad situation in Act 2 and that's at the dwarf cave where most people will probably just use the teleport and waypoint to regroup instead of trying to do each path solo and meet up at the center.
The problem of bloated stat and overkill only starts to go away in Act 3 where the enemies scaling are finally as high as your char. The game certainly do need to balance the gear scaling at level 12 to 17 for divine and legendary gears. Nerfing the items is a way to indirectly nerf skills like Arrow storm anyway. Outside those, I don't see much issue with the game balance as many build can clear it with little making a total mockery out of the game difficulty on tactician without relying on the "Run and Gun" strat.
