I didn't experiment with difficulties and this problem deep into the game, but early on torment I could go up against an army of wretches can be passed without using skills more than a few times. This encourages careful players like myself to drag out trash combat, consisting of nothing more than you clicking on enemies to chip down their HP. Whereas in Avernum such fights were all about preserving HP and using skills cleverly for every fight, in Avadon you can freely sacrifice HP even if you (die) the character just pops up after combat as long as one is left standing. This sounds great on paper, until you realize exactly what it means. That said, the value of vitality over health means trash mobs are exactly what the name implies: overly easy fights that do not require you to use any skills or items to get through. For that reason, skills do not use huge amounts of vitality and there are regeneration pools at key points.
Jeff Vogel seemed well aware of the necessity of preserving vitality, not wanting to force players to regularly slog back to the pillar, which is just boring. So far so good, there's nothing wrong with that in principle and it works well for the tougher fights. These pillars aren't always available, meaning the difficulty in many parts of the game should stem not from the fight being hard to get through, but rather the fight being passable without using up too much of your precious vitality and items. In Avadon, your hit points regenerate outside of combat (at a fairly high rate), while your vitality can only be restored through potions or by going to the traveling pillars. Of 4 Yet I have to put yet another "but" here.