2 points into a skill tree is nothing to have access to higher skills. In D:OS1 you had to invest far more to have access to higher Tier skills. It's part of the 'dumbing down' of everything. Having only a third of the knowledge of a skill tree but already being able to master even the most fierce skills just sounds odd. It also means that 5% more damage is pretty everything you will get for leveling up your skill trees even more which sounds pretty uninteresting.
You have to be careful with comparisons to other titles. Yes, D:OS1 did things differently, but it does not mean that it did it better. Neither is "dumbing down" an issue per se. Some systems are simply too complex to appeal to anyone but tiresome obsessives. If that is your target then fair enough but you are locking yourself out of the broader market. The reality of it is that, regardless of how sophisticated something is, the question to answer is: does it work? In this game, for physical, yes, it does. For magical, yes, it does, but just about and far less than physical. It doesn't really matter if you have A points in B or X points in Y - so long as a character is well built it should be optimal. The reality of it is that in the current state a well built magical damage character does not even near the effectiveness of a well built physical damage character.
i think there's something to be said about how underused staves are due to wand + shield on mages being so much better. the staff skill (i forget the name) is underwhelming and is something i would use only if literally every other offensive skill i had was on cooldown, and on tactician difficulty i find myself needing a shield due to the sparse physical armor given by mage armor. i could invest a couple of points in strength to wear warriors armor, but that feels bad when i'm already putting a ton of points into memory and robbing my int each level
Being frank, 2H has their use in crit builds so it is not a redundant skill.
While I find the idea of a Magefare tree intriguing, it would be similar to the crit issue. Spending points and skills on something that physical characters get for free.
I don't think magic is vastly underpowered. It's not that hard to bring into balance:
-Add serious elemental weaknesses to all the enemies with strong resistances (ie: anything with +100% fire should have -100% water).
-Heavily armored troops should have phy resistance and should be weak against magic (ie: no 40% resistances across the board, which is often the case).
-Remove the damage scaling from warfare. It makes no sense that putting points in warfare is more beneficial than spending points on the specific weapon type (2h, dual wielding, etc).
-Add a benefit to using staves. Having a global -1 to cooldowns while wielding a staff would be a pretty cool one.
-Allow crits naturally for spells.
Bravo - give the man a medal. I think some of your suggestions are really, really good. As things stand, the present encounter model is that you have 2 melee enemies with high physical resistance, 2 ranged enemies with high magical resistance and 2 caster enemies with high magical resistance. This means that a physical party is always going to be much more effective against four out of the six enemies.
If you add 50% physical damage resistance to the melee dudes and provide a negative magical damage resistance to some enemies it would mean that you actually have to pick your targets instead of just picking them off one by one. Rock, paper, scissors. Under the present system, magical provides for one while physical provides for all three. This would also restore the capabilities of a diverse party.
