All this talk about needing to land CC's and denial roles tell me people are running party comps that do mediocre damage and don't have companions respecced to have optimal stat allocations and feats instead of their gimped baseline odd number starting stats and bad subspecs like trickery cleric.
Or it could be telling you that there are multiple ways to breeze through this game, and the particular way you found is not the only one.
We're talking about the usefulness of the various wizard subclasses. I think the difference is that when I think about them, I'm evaluating them on their own. I'm not thinking of "Evocation wizard, but also dependent on my character taking this feat, and using this equipment, and my companions being optimized, etc, etc, etc." I'm thinking of the single most broken mechanic allowed to any of the subclasses in isolation. And that is by far and away the massive number of portent dice. Spell sculpting, frankly, doesn't even actually seem that great. The vast majority of the time I'm able to cast aoe spells into melee anyway by being a bit mindful about placement and fiddling around with where exactly I target the spell. That's why I consider it a nice "friendly feature" but not anything groundbreaking.
To me the hardest encounter in the game is Steelwatch Foundry with all the Banites in the second floor and having the goal of not letting a single Gondian die. No one but evocation or sorcs can do that as trivially. Unfortunately for all other encounters in this game, it's basically "Burst this big target in 2 turns, and because we powercreeped the hell out of martials and sorcerers, it's possible to even 1 turn the hardest boss in the game without even excessive optimization like prebuffing". You have the odd encounter like Cazador with his mist form, but when you realize all you need to do is free Astarion to remove the countdown mechanic, he too becomes a trivial fight. The Thorms have their respective gimmicks, as does Grym, but all of them easily exploitable and rewarding burst on top. Raphael is a joke when each pillar dies easily and stuns him on top, and by then you can just pop a sphere of invulnerability on Hope, park your casters in it, and watch Hope remove half the mobs with her divine intervention and then your casters clean house while your martials cut down pillars and raphael. Or alternatively, if you don't want to see the RP of Raphael transforming, you can just one turn him with a martial anyways with elixir of cloud giant strength and Balduran's sword.
Burst is too often the correct answer in this game. If both our spells and mob abilities were less power creeped with damage and enemies used more debuffing/rot conditions and lasted longer that we needed to think about CC, area denial, debuff cleansing, it might be better. But it's just not. Most things die within the first 3 turns even in the hardest difficulty.
