It is truly pathetic that the only game strategy that works now is go full damage and only one type of damage either physical or magical but not both or you will gimp your party and then don't engage in battle normaly but rather cheese the AI somehow to prevent all the enemies gang bang on your party and obliterate you, BECAUSE you can't CC you can't control the battlefield anymore so you are really stupid if you try to engage in a battle without cheesing it, the method that always works is to provoke the battle with 1 character and then run away as far as you can were your other team mates wait for the enemy to come 1 by one or the least amount possible so you can kill them withouth them grouping on you and kick your ass.
THIS IS NOT FUN PERIOD.
There is no "tactics" that is a lie, combat just became a 1 trick pony, there is not thinking anymore you just spam damaging abilities and stack damage to get rid of the 3 health bars ASAP.
While I'm just as annoyed with the armor system as anyone else that is (Thanks Mass Effect 2 Adept hell), the "tactics" from the previous game were just as non existent, despite all of the praise it got for the combat. Thing is, that game gave you
more options, not only for character builds, but also what you're functionally allowed to do at the start of any given encounter. But that freedom only really mattered maybe half of the game, if that. Once you had enough skills memorized, it became rote gameplay just like this, and it became trivialized once you unlocked the Master spells. Primarily because of the way initiative worked, and the best setup was to have enough so that your entire team went first.
This game is similar in that way too, except the "Master" spells require source. All that means is, you'll be casting the spells similarly as in the previous game, but with more downtime afterwards simply because of the hoop jumping to get source back (which isn't hard, it's just corpse hunting, waiting on cooldowns or going back to a pool each time is tedious).
From a CC perspective, the game is worse, but it's not really all that difficult. It also favors an all physical damage group over split or all magic, but split works just fine, and the game can be finished with a party of four Mages (Without Incarnates too!). I also greatly enjoyed my first playthrough for the story, side quests and dialogue--all which were mostly great. The game just doesn't have much replayability in its current state regarding combat or builds that actually work well within the current system.
They didn't really comment much on it throughout EA. Why would you expect them to comment now? However, while I understand your argument, you're being a bit too aggressive in my view.
I went against my first instinct and built a 2 Physical/2 Magic team, and I'm reaching the point where when one of my mages' turns comes up, I freeze up because I genuinely can't think of anything productive to do, even with a lot of skills on my skillbar sitting there unused.
Level 9/10 enemies have 300+ magic armor (and I've seen it as high as a ridiculous 800 on level 11 enemies), and I don't know what my mages can contribute to a fight other than buffing my physical attackers.
My first playthrough was with a split team, and aside from not being able to CC really at all aside from slow and cripple melee units (which
is phenomenal) until armor was down, it wasn't that much of an issue because I focused my casters on the enemy physicals, who typically have much less magical armor, while my Ranger (and occasionally slow ass Warrior) took care of the enemy casters. For evenly split damage bosses there was always the Bone Widow for physical as well as Shield Toss. Another thing is that standard
hard CC is mostly trash in this game due to it requiring two actions after armor is stripped. However, Charm only requires one, and it only needs two in Summoning.
I played through both a double lone wolf mage playthrough as well as a double lone wolf ranger knight playthrough and mages felt fine to me. The ranger knight was obviously easier because all you do with them is auto but my mages were more engaging to play and had little difficulty throughout almost every encounter, save the occasional enemy with fire resistance.
Lone Wolf shouldn't be used as a form of comparison. A party of two Lone Wolf Mages is much stronger than a group of four normal, especially because of the way initiative and turns happen. Lone Wolf is what you use when you want to power game through Tactician without any problems.
That poll in the other thread shows an even split between liking it and disliking it. Only 13% said that it doesn't need any changes. 59% want to see some changes, either minor or major, and about 23% say they hate it or liked how D:OS 1 did it. So it doesn't seem accurate to dismiss the idea of changes as appeasing a small minority.
That said, it's unlikely that Larian will do much to change it.
You might find the results to be similar across all purchases, but until you have a poll from thousands, it means very little since it's almost always going to be the vocal minority voting.
