Just there much more options, even imbalanced options. So saying that there only one way, and all other is 5 times worse, is untrue at least.
1) Five star Diner talent which double effect of every potions. You will have 100% dodge chance, 150% + resist all elemental resist without any downside.
2) Living on the edge scrolls. 2 turn immortality and you can recast as many you want. You can exchange your 1 hp vs full hp bosses or equlise to deal 50% of armor\hp damage, and always be under 100% more dmg with death wish buff.
3) Torturer talent with roots (pierce magic armor) make every melee enemy useless for 3 turn. With smoke bomb, ranged disabled too.
4) Ambidextrous talent and teleport scroll, and you can stack 6 enemies in one spot in one turn with adrenaline. Cast pyroclast source skill and fight done.
5) Swap surface skill with lava. In act2 wolf boss and ogre dying instanly.
And there a lot more, like charm enemies for 2-4 turn with grenades with huge aoe, which is lame, but there no limitation for it.
So am i really can say that the only way to play dos2 is swapping surface with lava and teleport enemies into it or being immune to dmg, or just charm enemies?! For me, no. Game have a lot more strategies. Even this pattern "Have a full ranged or a full physical party. This is encouraged by how the armor system works". For me it sound same as "why i need think in tactical game, if i can put death fog barrel and break it". I completed game with phys archer and fire mage, just 2 char without lone wolfs, and it was easy all time without any source skills.
Cool. We're basically in agreement about how cheesy D:OS2 gets then.
That said, D:OS2 still has plenty of tactical variety despite the cheese, because the game was deliberately designed to a level where
everything is cheese if used properly. Even barrelmancy isn't much of a problem there, because the effort/reward ratio was pretty low compared to the things that some skills were capable of.
DnD does
not work that way.
The entire point I am trying to make is that D:OS2's cheese is largely enabled by high ground/stealth ambush mechanics in some way. It was those that got imported into BG3, even if the former was changed from higher damage into straight up advantage. And the end result is that particular mechanic (and backstab advantage, which did exist in D:OS2 as a guaranteed critical hit) in combination with disengage/shove being switched from standard to bonus (and the omission of things like proper reactions and dodge action) has overpowered all of the base DnD mechanics in terms of tactical emphasis.
So all we're left with is something that's rather shallow at the end of the day. Even if we're currently locked to level 4 in BG3, the later levels won't really change that, because nothing in DnD exists that is anywhere near as powerful in order to act as a tactical counterbalance to what Larian did to the base mechanics. Combat in D:OS2 can be pretty fun once you figure things out, though you can get burned out rather quickly if you don't mix it up. Combat in BG3 is a straight up chore in comparison, because the changes have more or less powercrept half the spells into irrelevancy, and everything largely boils down to a race to high ground/shove spam. And maybe other party members attacking/shoving from stealth to burst down an enemy or two at the start of a fight.
(And again, there's also a reason I don't go after barrelmancy and field effects - they are symptoms rather than an actual problem. At the end of the day, they actually do add tactical variety to BG3 in their own way, while the high ground stuff and everything else I mentioned specifically takes that away.)
