Where do you see these 7 AC goblins? Most of them are 12AC from what I see. It is lower than 15AC stock goblin with shield and their HP hovers around ~12HP area most of the time, which is higher than stock 7, but these are not some drastic differences there.
Overall, my recurring feedback was that there are too much misses as a whole. I certainly prefer 12AC over 15AC, I certainly do not fancy gameplay of spending an hour trading misses. It would be better in real time mode game, where every round takes 6 seconds flat and a few misses will just prolong combat by half a minute or so, but here a round can go good 2 minutes+. I don't really want 1 hour battles, unless it's maybe a key Act fight like that
second Druid Grove gate battle.
and even then 1 hour would be pushing it really.
You can consider this change a homebrew which is perfectly fine. Larian is a DM in this case and it's within their power to make changes that they think will benefit the game. It's same thing as them tweaking other stuff, like dipping, surfaces or even making their own version of Ranger (thanks god for that, even WoTC do not know what to do with this class with all the revisions, rollbacks and errata for 5e Ranger).
A fair point on spell effectiveness and yes it also might mean they would need rebalance a lot and they will. We can already see a lot of changes and it's not the last of those, EA will last 1 year+. I would not worry about Fireball at this point, especially because it will for sure leave a fire surface that is pretty powerful in BG3 for zillion reasons. If anything they might need to nerf Fireball a bit, just like they did with Firebolt. Same goes for sleep - if they really will up HP across the board, they will buff Sleep and similar spells too eventually.
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Also, quite frankly. This game will last good 80 hours single playthrough. Some people here say "whelp, misses would be more exciting if there would be blocks and different miss animations" and they certainly need to put these in, but let's be real - it would be nice and all first 2-3 encounters, but then the miss trading would get very stale very fast anyway, the end result. Pretty sure, I would not give a damn if that skeleton warrior parries me with a sword or blocks with a shield or just sidesteps 60 hours in on several misses in a row - it would be just annoyance all the same.
