The problem with PoE's combat for me is mostly with difficulty and variety. The system itself is fine, at least, I don't see how it's much worse than BG's, but it has the same issue like every other Kickstarter RPG I've played (and many non-kickstarter ones as well) in that on hardest difficulty it starts off reasonably hard but after you've gathered your party, gained some useful spells or found good items, somewhere at around 30-40% of the game, the difficulty drops to rock bottom. Same thing happened in Divinity. Same thing happened in Wasteland 2. Same thing happened in Lords of Xulima.
That's why I partially agree with Lhynn's comments about difficulty. If we talk about the first third or so of the game, then I will disagree with the claims that the game is too easy, that it requires no thought or tactics and you can just tank and dps every encounter. I started playing PoE on PotD on release and then made a break from it and came back and finished it later. I think patch 2.0 was out by that time (it was funny coming back to the game and finding out that elementals were now immune to piercing attacks when half of my party used guns). My experience was as follows:
In the beginning and early mid game surviving was difficult. When fighting ghosts, 5 of them would just teleport surround Aloth and instagib him, and then move on to my next lowest hp character. A tiny boar could run up to one of my casters and crit him for 60 damage (when the max hp was 30-40). If left unchecked, an ogre shaman's insect swarm will completely drain all your character's hp (except for maybe the tankiest fighter), and when you heal them, it will drain them all over again again. Also hitting anything was hard, cause enemies' defenses were inflated on PotD and your accuracy is shit in the beginning so at least 2 times out of 3 you will miss or glance. I had to do different shit in order to survive - abuse choke points, place traps, mess around with positioning, buff and debuff and use spell combinations (my favorite was summoning a ghost behind enemy lines with Kana and then casting my cipher's mind link (the one that damages all enemies between you and your target) on it and use it to run around the enemies constantly damaging them). I couldn't just select all my guys and right click the nearest cunt - I would die, really fast.
However, the longer the game went the easier it became because you started getting shit like stronger heals, combat resurrection, large aoe stun spells and etc. until eventually the combat kinda devolved into selecting all my dudes and clicking on the nearest cunt while using 2-3 of the same spells, like Lhynn described. Yes you do get a number of tactical options in PoE - it's not just DPS spam and claiming otherwise is bullshit. For example, buffs and debuffs are actually really useful, and no they do not last only 5 seconds, they last enough time to be valuable. Casting a couple of accuracy buffs can increase your chance of hitting a particularly agile enemy from 30% to 60-70%. That's huge. A 10 second AoE stun is also a great spell, because during those 10 seconds you can sometimes kill a powerful enemy with basic attacks alone. Also, initially I hated the fact that you couldn't buff outside combat, but later I've learned to appreciate it. It gives you meaningful choice - do you spend precious seconds on a damaging spell that may or may not kill the target, or you can buff your accuracy and damage before that to guarantee a kill, or defend yourself from a status effect it will use, etc. Yes it's stupid that the game arbitrarily restricts you from using certain spells when you're not fighting because, but you know what - pre-buffing in BG2 was fun the first few times but then it just becomes as existing and involving as going through a supermarket checklist, so I don't miss it.
However, all of these tactical options become meaningless because in the mid-late game there are really very few enemies that can pose a threat to you. In BG2 when you're fighting a powerful mage you need to remove his protections before you can hit him, but you can't cast a protection removing spell on him because first you must remove his greater invisibility or whatever, and you better do it fast because if you don't he will time stop and cast 5 meteor showers on your ass. There's simply not a single enemy in PoE that presents this level of danger to the player. The closest thing is the Endless Paths final boss, which, I admit, I didn't even bother fighting, because I was really late in the game and wanted to see how the story ends and when the fucker oneshotted half of my party with his breath attack as soon as combat started, I thought "nope, can't be dealing with this shit right now" and reloaded and went for the peaceful solution. Another thing that makes combat more boring than BG2 is that there's not enough spell variety and many of the high level spells are very underwhelming and not as effective as a tier 3 fireball.
TL;DR - PoE systems are fine but the combat is shit because the enemies are weak and there's not enough different impactful spells