You keep mentioning DOS as if it was some sort of ultimate evidence that Larian can do no wrong, when incidentally the inane amount of subsystems that were either ill-conceived or downright broken is one of the major reasons I trust Larian's game designers only as far as I can throw them.
For how much I liked DOS 1 and 2 (I used to mention both as my strongest candidates for "game of the year" in their respective launch windows) they are also games that have some spectacularly BAD subsystems. Examples may include:
ITEMIZATION
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Both DOS1 and 2 have some of the WORST itemization I've ever seen in a party-based CRPG, for one. Not just dull, not even just uninspired or unsatisfying. No, we are talking about downright annoying.
Do you know what's a terrible match for a story-driven RPG with a finite number of enemies and encounters? A Diablo-like randomized loot that keeps throwing randomly generated and super-generic trash at you.
Do you know what's even worse? A system tuned to ramp up in power so steeply and so frequently that nothing you'll find will ever be a good fit for your characters for more than a couple of levels. And you won't have your single Diablo-like character to dress up, no, but a whole damn party.
Man, how could we make this any worse at this point? Oh, I got this! What if we added a Lucky Finder skill and made it so that opening any random container in the game (and in a game where there are what feels like BILLIONS of them) would have a fairly solid chance to give you items of better quality of what you got from bosses barely 30 minutes before?
The amount of unnecessary inventory busywork plus the unshakable sense of dissatisfaction at the realization that nothing really mattered and everything was generic vendor trash made the loot system/itemization aggressively detrimental to the quality of the game.
ARMOR SYSTEM
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The problem with the armor system in DOS 2 is that it makes hardly any sense in principle and it creates way more problems that it was set to solve.
Discouraging mixed sources of damage (which it factually does, it doesn't matter if you can work your way around it) is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also the fact that makes a certain amount of utility skills/spells utterly useless (not "unreliable" as much as literally 100% pointless to even attempt) until a certain threshold of damage has been passed, etc.
Basically it's a system of HP bloat (now in three different flavors!) that favors direct damage dealing above any other strategy. And conversely once that threshold of damage is surpassed the exact opposite becomes true, and some of these crowd controls become 100% reliable.
I mean, sure, you can learn to live with that. We all did.
But holy fucking Christ if it doesn't go straight in the bottom tier among all the countless attempts at "simulating damage mitigation" I've experienced across the years in different rulesets.
The system is simply bad. It splits combat into two phases:
One where you avoid using most skills to not waste status effects.
One where everyone is spamming status effects and crowd controls, or at least those characters who aren't currently stunned, knocked down or polymorphed into poultry while bleeding and on fire.
It also fails to have any semblance to anything. Ablative HPs are generally not particularly good armor mechanics. Ablative armor over entire battle duration is just singularly awful and being combined with cooldowns and stupidly abstract and highly segregated damage system (odd chloroform notwithstanding) doesn't do it any favors.
Smaller split pools depleted and replenishing on per turn basis might actually be quite tolerable both in terms of gameplay (encouraging more tactical approach than non-status alpha strike followed by status alpha strike) and in terms of making sense (overwhelming combatants defenses by concentrating attacks on them), but the system as it is is just a huge clusterfuck of concentrated derp.
AN EXCEEDINGLY STEEP POWER CURVE
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This is a partial overlap with the itemization, but the skill/perk system has its own share of problems. Power levels climb too fast, the system itself is dull and rewards min-maxing stats more than any other strategy and perks seem come only in the two variants "This is unmissable" and "This is absolutely worthless".
ONE OF THE WORST CONTROL SCHEMES IN THE GENRE TO DATE
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Well, I've already said more than enough about this.I have the megathread in my signature and the topic came up once again even just recently in a discussion you participated to.
Yeah, sure. "It doesn't bother you". Which doesn't mean it's any good.
There is a lot to like in DoS2 including sizable chunks of combat system, but there is no denying that large parts of it are just inexplicably bad. This includes armor system, damage system, ease of traversing terrain with everyone having jump, flight or teleportation abilities trivializing all those nice area layouts Larian lovingly made as well as lesser things such as nearly inconsequential initiative.
What's worse, they were warned ahead of time of the problems and every time they minimized, downplayed or downright dismissed most of the negative feedback with their usual tune "Nah, it's great, you guys don't get it but you'll come around to love it at some point", only to come back months after the fact to admit "Well, damn, you guys were right, that system was somewhat bad. Tough luck, maybe next time!".
So no, I don't really plan to sit and "let Larian do their things" in a misguide sense of confidence that they can do no wrong.
Past great accomplishments or failures aside, you are being somewhat dismissive of a lot of negative feedback they got over time as if it was just a matter of being a D&D and/or a "classic BG" zealot.
How about acknowledging that people are not just saying "X is bad" but going to great lengths to point EXACTLY what's bad with what they are critizing.
Imagine how many of the often abominable choices that were present in the first EA build (Healing food, jump as a convenient disengage and walking around a character to get advantage come to mind) would have made into release (making the game significantly worse) if hordes of EA testers didn't get very vocal against their existence.
