Respectfully, hard, hard disagree.
The "party abilities meticulously developed through the whole act" are fun, but they already dominate almost every single fight. The combat of whittling down HP while controlling the action economy on the field is very monotonous. Indeed, while you have many choices in how you go about it, the only way to win a fight is to combine enough damaging moves and stat changes to defeat your enemy. I think there's a reason there's more to DnD systems than just the combat system; imagine if DnD was just roleplayed combat rolls. The Grym fight is the only fight in the entire game that follows a different pattern of encouraging you to remove immunity while luring to a specific spot on the board (and it informs you through lore). You can use your "party abilities meticulously developed through the whole act" at the Githyanki Patrol Fight, or the Hag Fight, or the Battle for the Grove, or the Nere Fight, or the Goblin Camp Fights, or the Myconid Fight, or the Spectator Fight, or all of the other fights. Different forms of combat with different objectives and different means of achieving those objectives are important in providing a varied experience to the game. Again, you are going to use the party abilities in the overwhelming majority of combat situations. This is a given, as Larian is certainly going to use the system they made for the game. Puzzle combat is not there to replace party ability combat, but to break up the monotony of objectives and means. For once, a situation where a warlock can't Eldritch Blast its way out of the matter is not too much. A wizard cannot cast into convenience; a fighter cannot bludgeon into obedience. This isn't a bad thing because the Grym fight is an exception, not the rule. I would be very, very disappointed if combat were boiled down to just a system of HP-whittling or stat modifying. I find that to be an unfathomably boring experience and think there is no good reason to remove puzzles from combat.
