Combat should NOT be a jack-of-all-trades.

Devil's advocate: if stats and skills (abilities, whatnot) come from the same pool of points, using stats to override class restrictions creates a trade-off that, imo, is questionable. It would depend on the relative strength of gear vs. abilities. If abilities are way stronger than gear, it's a losing proposition to spend points on stats for the sake of gear, at least with respect to combat effectiveness. If gear is way stronger than abilities, spending points on stats is optimal for combat effectiveness, but brings into question the value of pure class based abilities in the first place. What's the point of even playing a pure mage if the fighter/magic user/thief build is always optimal for combat?

Now if the stats points and skills points are separate pools, like in Bethesda games, I like it a lot better. Then the trade-offs remain within the same regime: stat vs. stat or skill vs. skill, instead of stat(gear) vs. skill.

I agree that game balancing is likely easier if they are separate pools. Though whenever stat-based gear is brought up, I'm reminded of this...

I hope you're in charge of such things then

You hated the gameplay of the spells or the fact that the magic schools appeared muddled compared to Origins?

Yeah, the 3 elemental trees felt like 1 tree needlessly duplicated, while many of the more distinct and interesting spells were turned into specialisations.

You could boil the elemental trees down to something like

Fade Step
Winters Grasp (damage+CC combo)
Fire Mine (AoE Damage)
Energy Barrage (Single target Damage)
Static Cage (blocking spell)

And not really lose much. Though I wouldn't mind if you had two damage trees, like DA2. But we definitely needed the Necromancer tree freed from the specialisation and restored as Entropy.

I like fast so 2 wins it for me, although best an most fun combat i ever had was dragons dogma: dark arisen, no bioware, no bethesda an no cdpr combat comes close to that game for fun combat.

I liked some of the individual skills in da:i but yeah was a huge step backwards in terms of skill trees, i actually thought, especially mage, that advanced specs were utterly boring, most my mages just went base skills an ignored advanced, da:o meh it did the job, i can understand the appeal of it for stone age rpers, but tbh im one of the auld timers that is actualy preferring more action orientated gameplay, my inner child i suppose.

I still play some of old top down rpg an prob will buy divinity but i like the direction bioware had took an look forward i guess to next installment, i just hoping for more specs ala da2

Ohh i liked the approach in me:a with having everything available to player an they build there own player, skills i mean, imagine having all mage, warrior, rogue skills available an you just build n play your own style, i think thats way forward, the trinity can an should be left behind now aswell

I was just happy to get useful CC back after DA2. DAI's Static Cage was a fine replacement for DAO's Paralysis Explosion.

I did much prefer the diversity of options available in DAO, though. The Glyph line was inspired, and I missed its like in the subsequent games. Also, Animate Dead created a persistent pet - I'd love to have that back, as well.

Put animate dead in the necro specialization would be a good change.

I found the cc options of 2 to be a bit more responsive, although it was limited. Sword and board warriors like aveline or some of my Hawke's were better in that role than a cc anders or bethany.

I'd like to see classes get more... distinct. Like others have said, mage skill trees did seem to just be copy-paste and slap a different element on it, and I'm sure a lot of the other classes had similar issues too.

I might eventually get hit (not necessarily, though), but that's beside the point.

Tanking is actively choosing to get hit. That's dumb.

Better to stay far back in the shadows and cast nasty offensive spells. 

It's a bad mechanic that never made any sense outside of the extremely contrived mechanics of MMORPGs.

You know me. I never accept gameplay/lore segregation without complaint.

Or gameplay/story.
Or story/lore.

One coherent system for everything.