Why do I need to finish the game? Does the combat system or character developement somehow magical change after Act 2, does the AI suddenly get smarter? Most of the flaws of the combat system, was already predicatable during EA. The Attribute system was even worse at that time. The core problem of the game is, you don't need to play it fully to grasp all those basic flaws. Many others are easily devirable by reading and making logical conclusions.
I don't know, if Larian really did read everything, but I suppose my amount of posts proves, that is pretty much did.
Honestly my friend and I did not like the story that much from the get go, the 'Competative' aspect totally ruins the 'cooperative' feeling, for which we liked the first game. And as far as I read, the story gets even worse later on, so there is not a huge inclination to finish even because of the story.
it's just weird to me that you find your subjective problems with this game to be so fundamental and worth repeating over an extended period when you can't even be bothered to finish the game
if it's so bad that you couldn't finish it, what are you doing here?
what constructive help could you possibly be at this point? why not just forget about it, since it's obvious this game simply isn't for you?
In base game (not def), the combat imo gets worse bc of the inflation of hp and dmg. And for me and my gf (we do co-op), we need to have a balanced team of magic and phys dmg bc half the enemies in the game will have "1k phys armor, 200 magic", cuz lul. And vice versa, Yeah, we could do all physical and beat down that 1k physical, but why bother? The game is unbalanced in multiple aspects when it comes to magic, and in original it got worse as it went on due to "stat jumps".
you don't need to have a split team in the base game. in fact, doing so makes the game harder
because of how damage values scale, higher physical armor and low magic armor doesn't really make any difference if you spec your team properly because your damage output will be far too high for any armor value to matter, and this just becomes more true the further into the game you go (which is why combat gets progressively easier)
the game certainly suffers from combat issues later in the game but they aren't the problems you're mentioning. most of the problem with magic was the arbitrarily high resistances to it, with no real equivalent existing for physical damage, thus solidifying physical damage as having an overall superior output
