The insane jump in everything - health, damage, equipment stats - is likely an attempt to make each leveling up feel significant.
Sadly, this made only the getting the level itself important.
Attributes and skills on the other hand turned into near pointless 'choose your color of damage increase'. You could assign class and let characters autolevel their attributes, and there would not be much lost in my eyes. The gain from attributes feels like a drop on a hot stone compared to the gain by the level up itself.
and the party banter got thrown out of the window together with real coop feeling for the sake of 'competative gameplay' possibilities.
