It is always a problematic mechanic in computer RPG
Not always. Wrath of the Righteous uses rests pretty well. With actual passage of time and consequences of such things. Meaning you didn't spam rests to cheese the game.
Wartales also uses rests reasonably well. Again, you bypass the nature of rest spamming by having time advance and consequences for such things (I.e. Quests are time based for full rewards) in addition to more limited resources (Food and gold to upkeep your party. Even more so if anyone happens to have a negative personality trait that requires specific dietary needs like meat or alcohol)
I hope cooldowns won't come back
Personally, I do.
I find that cooldowns provide a much better gameflow. Both in terms of stuff like resting (Whereby there's no incentive to rest spam to always have all your most powerful abilities ready), but also individual combat. Whereby you don't just spam your best ability every turn and are promoted to use a variety of actions.
Of course, you can still mess it up if you do something like ME2/ME3's shared cooldowns, which has all the negatives of pushing you to spam your best skill on top of the penalty of being locked out of skills constantly...
My main qualm with DOS2's system was that the entire thing was not balanced very well. Everything had relatively long cooldowns and their impact was barely (If at all) better than just using regular attack actions (Especially with the abhorrent armour system making any status effects useless). Like, the most notorious example was with Necromancer, where your only basic direct damage skills are Mosquito Swarm and Decaying Touch which had whopping 3 turn cooldowns and was basically just a regular attack that you could do any turn with no cooldown (Even worse if you'd modded in more items and had physical damage staffs that would scale with intelligence).
There are other systems like resource based ones (Such as Mana/Energy) but I find that they too, fall into similar pitfalls where you are best served by just spamming your most effective skill over and over (Whether it's the most powerful or most efficient)
Of course, there's always the catch of a cooldown based system being kind of repetitive since you can always open every combat with your strongest abilities. Though there are ways around that, such as certain skills being on cooldown when combat starts, or combining cooldowns with resources (For example, you do actions to build a resource, then you can use a powerful ability that has a cooldown. Then the next time you build the resource, you have to use something else as the best ability is on cooldown)
What I would be satisfied is just a more evocative map design. Larian's maps feel so... fake? Bits of content stitched together that don't add up into an immersive experience. There are bits in BG3 that work for me, but just bits.
I do wonder what their plans are for the world. Their comments about the game being "Of larger scope in both depth and breadth" along with comments regarding how companions in BG3 felt "Isolated from the world" could suggest they want a less linear experience.
Thus allowing them to put in some distance to make the world feel better, rather than having to cram everything for an Act into a singular map. For example, they could have you go to different cities and locations surrounding them. All within a singular Act.
This would allow for things to be presented more naturally. Though, it does bring in the question of content density which is often a thing in more sandbox style designs.
But we'll have to wait and see I guess. They might still just continue on with the 1 map per act design and cramming all these things into a single small space which can lead to everything feeling awkward and disconnected (As well as some dissonance between scale and NPC interactions)
