Long story short, I have played ToEE, IWD 1/2, NWN1/2, BG1/2(classic and EE), Pathfinder Kingmaker, Solasta, Dark Sun : Shattered Sands/Wake of the ravager, and tons of other games. By far, BG3 is the game where you fell more useless and your spells fells weaker. "but nwn2", not even nwn2 who destroyed most iconic spells, like animate dead, cloudkill, black tentacles, etc; reached the level of BG3. Why?
- Low level dungeons & kobolds "epic" campaign
- Ludicrous MMO like HP bloat without bloating spells
- Artificial gear dependency.
- Magical items are extremely mundane while powerful spells aren't
- DOS style gimmicky everywhere
- WORST ui to cast spells.
Now point for point
1 - Ridiculous low(4 EA/10 final) lv cap. That lv cap is so low and in a interview, they mentioned that the higher tier spells can't work in video games. Did anyone on that interview even played BG2:SoA and ToB???? This game implemented a lot of high level magic and even epic level magic on HLA. Wish is with very limitations on BG2. Same for stop time. In fact, you can fight enemies that cast stop time on the, before even reaching underdark.
And talking about underdark, an campaign which starts with a mindflayer ship fighting an draconic army and has you on underdark at chapter 1 should't be a low level campaign. You reach the underdark of the nwn1 : hotu on chapter 1 too however, hordes of the underdark expansion starts at lv 15. And the game gives a lot of XP to bumb you to epic level before chapter 2 where you fight dracoliches and mindflayer colonies.
Or you have a low level campaign or you have a epic campaign, you can't have both. Low level campaigns should start in a place like Candlekeep.
