Could you elaborate? The few positive (to my ears) comments I read on the Spiderweb boards was that while the character system was streamlined, the bosses and the player would have cool and interesting abilities more than in previous Spiderweb games?
I can try.
First, about player having moar abilities - total wash. Like, no, from the mathematical point of view, yes, there are a greater number of differently named abilities that are available to the player, but most of them are almost similar to each other and nearly all debuffing abilities (and there's a heck of a lot of debuffing abilities there) almost never work on bosses. Take stun, for example - sure, you can easily stun a grind mob with it (only why would you want to? it's faster to simply kill it), but when it comes to a boss (e.g. to a situation where you really needed) your chances are abysmal. You stun them occasionally, but it's totally not worth it. And same goes for the acid, poison, slows and other debuffs. BTW, buffs are also not that useful since, once again, you don't need them versus common creeps and when it comes to bosses, tough ones, it is usually more efficient to use buffing scrolls\crystals\potions. Summons also don't do much to bosses, they can't even hope to tank them, IIRC. In the end, you're left with your basic popamole attacks and some AoE, if needed - man, what a diverse pool of abilities!
Second, the thing about bosses themselves. There's, like, three categories of them:
a. Bosses that may have some interesting abilities, only they die so fast (even on hard - never tried nightmage since I was already tired by HP bloat on those stupid trash mobs) that they have no time to use them. When your boss is killed in two or three turns, he can't do much, can he?
b. Bosses that are copy\pasted from Avernum and Geneforge: now, theoretically, there are some good ones here, only I still remember how fun it was to kill them in the aforementioned games, so if I want another try why would I play this decayed piece of shit, why won't I replay them?
c. Bosses that are totally new and totally boring: biggest example here is the (optional) final boss. Fuck. It's not like he's really dangerous or something, it's just that he heals almost all damage that he takes so it can literally take hours to kill him, even if you were power-gaming. Think about taking down 10k hp (number is estimated, don't remember correctly) by, say, 10 hp a turn, using the same repetitive actions turn into turn. Fu-u-u.... n.