Melee point-plank AoE abilities have very short range. I don't have evade and I avoid them easily now (took some getting used to). Just take two steps back when the bear rears back on its hind legs. Wait a beat, and then step back in and keep on killing.
While they have short range, they also come with phantom 360 aoes that you can't always avoid depending on the angle. The attacks are fast enough that you may be stuck in an animation when it comes (especially true for two hand warriors) and won't have enough time to respond. Especially since there is a lag before you press a button to move and actually move.
In Origins and 2 the movement was far more responsive. It was quite easy to make precise movement in order to hit a target with Cone of Cold in Origins without your melee or to land Mighty Blow without killing your melee teammates in 2. Unless my Rogue is behind a dragon or some demon, I don't expect him to be taking unpreventable damage just for being behind their target. Positioning should matter and we shouldn't be penalized by the proximity of our characters to their target like this.
This is all compounded by the fact sometimes you have to do this for multiple characters (I like to run a 3 melee party) and that sometimes you face multiples of those enemies at once (nothing like multiple enforces swinging their clubs to create phantom fields of deadly invisible aoe). One tank and 3 ranged set up, especially with 2 mages, shouldn't be so much superior to running multiple melee characters.
What's worse, pretty much every enemy of this sort I have encountered comes with with CC immunity. This kind of stuff was reserved for large bosses or very powerful enemies before, and not random uncommon, yet numerous, enemies. Combined with the fact that they have so much more hp than regular enemies they just end up being a potion sink or gear check (especially in a melee heavy party where damage is often unavoidable) since you literally can't do anything to them but attempt to damage race. Yea, I'm up to a point where during the lifetime of a single barrier I can burst down these enemies now, but that's an accomplishment solely of my gear and not tactics.
And the fact is, your tactics against those kind of enemies are heavily limited in a melee heavy party. It's almost as those CC immune 360 aoe enemies are designed in mind of you playing with the quasi-action elements since the CRPG mechanism of attack and defense is gone in Inquisition (I guess they wanted to make this more like an arpg like Skyrim or Dark Souls). Except the quasi-action elements take wasted talents, a slot on the skill bar, and downtime that does not affect ranged classes. Archer Rogues and Mages don't care, because they don't lose time on target that you spend manually dodging invisible aoes for melee, manually or through abilities. Mages can alleviate this problem with barriers for your melee. Guard seems to scale poorly, especially compared to barrier, that it becomes useless later in the game too. As if needed more reasons to take a Mage.
Overall, I wish I could get an answer from Bioware if these enemies were designed to work like these (i.e. 360 aoe dealing cc immune damage sponges) or if the issue is messy hitboxes that aren't supposed to have 360 range. I'm hope it's the latter, since Mighty Blow has similar bizarre hitbox properties as those aoe melee attacks from the cc immune mobs. And if it is supposed to work that way, well that's a pretty bad design decision that only hurts melee characters and punishes player choices.
If they wanted to make this more like an action game, then they shouldn't have made such horrid hitboxes and let you roll/evade/fade/block/parry/whatever step from the start without a talent. Skyrim or Dark Souls don't force you to level up multiple times just so that you can roll or block.
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