A very thorough post. I generally agree with a lot of what you wrote, but I disagree on a few points.
13. Risk Management is gone, RNG remains.
Accuracy, Ability Success, and Saving Throws are either gone or redundant now. Despite this, RNG elements still plague the game with Critical Hits, randomly generated gear and loot, and various random % effects on generated equipment, amongst other examples. There is no element of chance one can strategize around, but plenty of dice rolled.
I partly agree about the RNG loot, but I disagree about critical hits. I don't actually pay attention to random % effects on items, those are unreliable, so my eyes don't register that information as important.
22. Cooldowns are prohibitive.
Ways to reduce your cooldowns are nearly as scarce as AP manipulation, despite this being a mechanic in the previous game. Many abilities still seem to be balanced around this (or just straight ported from D:OS1) or the EA’s spell cooldown reduction.
I mostly disagree with this point. Cooldown reduction in D:OS 1 contributed to wild imbalances in the game, especially when it came to mages, who could stack points into INT and vastly outclass physical characters spamming a ton of varied attacks. I celebrated the removal of cooldown reduction, which merely made it more difficult to properly balance the game.
I'm quite sure that D:OS 2's EA did not have cooldown reduction as a mechanic.
That said, cooldown reduction under specific circumstances might be interesting. I even suggested a Talent which reduces cooldowns by 1 turn to a minumum of 0 if Warm, Burning, or Necrofire at the start of the turn, and increases cooldowns by 1 turn if Chilled or Frozen at the start of the turn.
