IMO the skill card system is one of if not the weakest system in the game. It was just a bad idea from the start.
I'm willing to eat a lot of crap, but still imo it's ok-ish. Two particularly dumb things to me though is that they repeatedly promised party "tactics" for some time, kind of stuff that's been in various games, like for example having a menu for Cait where you can prioritize her auto actions, ie priority 1, revive fallen ally, 2 heal ally below 75% hp, 3 aoe. Like scripts in dnd games. Then they shifted to saying companions would get kits, "just play full manual every fight lmao" and pushed tactics under the rug.
Therefore, the auto party can be very dumb. It's particularly egregious when doing stuff like sparring a high level azyrran, she auto ults after like 50% hp every time, generally acts smarter, makes her a lot better. It'd be nice if at minimum there were options like that for the party, particularly when the game was originally built for only PC manual control, and there's so many rest options "wasted" ults would be incredibly minimal compared to not using them at all. for people that just want ero stuff and/or play auto battler, that makes their experience worse.
Then, for people that like trying to min max or take it seriously a bit, as was mentioned, they chose like the most universally poorly received core dnd system. Also, been a while since I saw the post a dev made mentioning it, but long story short, the other flaw with their gameplay system is bosses can never be particularly complex, or have like changing behavior patterns in the same fight, which is probably what leads to the Mexican standoff fights damage wise, and weird fight interruptions like in Alissa's second fight. Haven't checked in game but I'd guess that'd probably be a clever way of replacing them with a duplicate, but with changed abilities to mimic a new phase.
It's dumb though because it either makes enemies that should be a minor concernTM, like lovecraft monster, very reasonably one shot, or like with Alissa, will randomly start a cutscene, completely destroy your rotation and can cause a victory to become a loss. Imo could probably do with another durability update, all ally/enemy damage being reduced. Random ally one shots are more annoying than enemies being spongy, and some enemies do need to be spongier. (Except for gweyr/kinu fights those can be stoopidly boring and annoying) It'd be nice to have some reasonably long, resource draining fights, maybe with more money to compensate. Then again, think they've said there'll be no superboss-y fights with stuff like the gods.
It's really annoying how, on every level, there's no "every hole/horse weiner's a goal" freedom, there's restricted power levels, and far too many characters need a kick in the head but PC is gaslit or unable to do so. You can't bang x *because*, y is constantly a prick to PC but *muh culture*, you will never be able to be on the same level as an augmented human paladin (??) bish whur. Step one needed to be making sure players had at least some reason to not commonly want a Berserk Eclipse, but apparently they thought perma cripple Griffith would make for a great mc