Man guys. Words... Words.. Words.
Just be aware that I'm going to be hypocritically and frothy-mouthed pissed if you guys tl;dr this deposition.
Baldur's Gate (2)'s tactical combat had some fundamental limitations on how it worked. This made it difficult more often than any game nowadays could be. For starters, there wasn't anything that graphically showed a spell's AoE. I can't tell you the number of times I've accidentally killed Aerie by having her sling a lightning bolt at foes Minsc was dealing with, only to have it bounce off a wall hitting Minsc twice (not a problem, elemental resistance) and Aerie once for upwards of 1/2 damage.
Or how often I'd target a fireball and have it either completely miss a group of foes or be locked onto a foe whose speed dramatically outpaced what I was expecting, dooming every member of the party, and not just my fire resisting tanks to a shower of flames.
The most frustrating thing about DA:O (as I've said broken record times before) is that the console versions don't have command queues. So I have a bad habit of cancelling spells or actions before they activate but after they've been moved to cooldown.
Personal frustrations with implementation aside, Dragonage does have enough BioWare in it that "it has a lot more going for it than tactical combat". The major difference between DAO and BG2 is that AD&D was constructed and refined to have an intricate web of checks, balances, and counters. Obviously they've got lots of unintuitive and frankly stupid ideas that I love to complain about (a separate save for wands? That's really different from a save from a spell?) but ultimately planning for any contingency was impossible, and the game duly rewards you for being ready to face a much smaller set of problems efficiently. DAO on the other hand gives you access to a much wider pool of resources from the start and expects you to make decisions about a smaller set of strategies that preempt the powers of your foes. Remember here that BG2 had lots of tremendously awful status ailments, many far worse than getting webbed or oven overwhelmed by a giant spider (though it's a D&D game, you're bound to get webbed at some point). However, where in BG2 it was (usually, if you planned for it) possible to cure these status ailments on the fly as well as use preemptive protections and solutions (MAGE GO SQUISH) to deal with these problems, in DAO you are primarily left with only the latter option.
It's true you can undo crushing prison with a quick application of force field on the target, and it's true that most stuns or knockdowns will undo ogre, monster, and even dragon overwhelm type attacks. But the game is a bit bad about giving feedback as to when these "cures" are the results of your character's actions rather than just the caprice of the ravenous monster.
