I don't find this aggressive. Honestly if I were the one writing a feedback, chances are I'd sound way more aggressive. In fact, in this particular case, our aggressiveness would be perfectly understandable because as you pointed out, a lot of things broken now used to work fine in classic. On top of that are many new problems shipped with the DE. I try to overlook most of the technical issues though, as this is the first time Larian ported their game to consoles.
About the Arx part, I also had trouble trying to catch up to the levels of encounters in Arx. I was level 18 when getting to Arx, and had to scour the entire city to get to level 20 while trying to avoid fighting major fights being underleveled. After fighting through the Dream World (didn't have Red Prince so I just killed everyone for the XP) I was level 19 and had only Isbeil, Doctor, and final fight left, and hit 20 during Isbeil fight. But, I did skip a few major fights on Nameless Isle, so I'm not too sure if something's weird about encounter levels in Arx. I had to progress in a fairly tight route to make sure I didn't have to fight too many overleveled encounters.
I didn't have a whole lot of trouble with combat in general, it's just that I kept having the nagging doubt that I was missing something major. In comparison, in Act 2, you just need to be a bit mindful about where to go and whom to fight and you won't have to fight any overleveled fight. Whereas in Act 4, you are forced to fight a bunch of fights while being underleveled, because there's just not enough stuff for you to do to keep up in terms of experience. The level 20 demon ambush being thrown at my level 18 party while I was just casually strolling about was one of the biggest WTF moments (and questions) in my playthrough. While I eventually managed to kill all of them, I couldn't shake off the feeling that that encounter was just... not right.
I for one can't see the real point of the whole "Sir Lora" bit. You can't control him, and he doesn't help you in combat in any way, yet he gets killed easily by pretty much anything, and he also blocks your pathing both in and out of combat. Why was he not made invulnerable then? Is he supposed to just provide an extra little story as flavor? If so, the extra dialogs with him are too few and far between it's absolutely not worth all the trouble of keeping him around. You can get a bunch of skill recipes from him, but what's the point? If this is your first playthrough, you find all that out by yourself eventually anyway. For players who have already played the game like me, this is completely useless. After the conversation with him just before the final fight, I was hoping something "cool" would FINALLY happen. Nope. Nothing. And in the epilogue, I found myself asking myself that question again: "What was the point of this character?" If he's really supposed to just add a bit of flavor, then the real problem here is that he is extremely poorly implemented for that purpose. You can safely assume that no one in the development team spent any time playing the game at all with this character, just to see if there's any problems. From a principle perspective, this is just... not acceptable.
They did decrease the armor values (and HP progression too?) on equipment and damage output in general, but that's about it. The overall balance is the same. How weak or strong something is compared to everything else, is the same. In this playthrough I had my main focus on Geo and I finally got to see how ABSOLUTELY BROKEN Pyroclasic Eruption is. Compared to other ultimate source skills, it has virtually no RNG factor to it (it can't "miss" like other ultimates), costs 1 less AP, requires no aiming, and has an insane damage potential. Since it throws a small AoE at every enemy in range (which is huge), if several enemies are close together, each of them will be hit by all of the small AoE's, for an absurd amount of total damage. A short example: I killed a non-weakened full HP full armor Adramahlihk in one single turn, without being Lone Wolf, by stacking 3 enemies on top of him before using Pyroclastic Eruption.
All that said, there is still a lot of the "experimental" aspect in Larian's formula. I have no problem with them wanting to try out new things when going from the first game to the second game, although I don't like all the simplifications in combat mechanics (talents, attributes, skills). For their next iteration, I hope that they would focus more on what makes a single-player game great. Combat-wise, I hope they would design their mechanics in a more focused and systematic manner. Combat is rather "all over the place" in DOS2. If they still stick with the party-based thing, my suggestion is that they play one of the Dragon Age games, as they have very good writing for companions.
