The overall game experience:

First I would like to say that what you have provided is BLOODY AWESOME, but please don;t make us wait that long again.

Before I continue I just want to say that I have made some comparisons with D3 as I believe that they serve a real purpose, as there are people that love to bash on the poor handicap game.

• Difficulty –

I’m playing with a mele, two-hand build at the moment so I don’t know if this is relevant to the rest of the builds.

The overall difficulty of the game is good I think that you guys have managed to create a really enjoyable product as I was constantly engaged during my leveling and I can do 4 levels + dungeons with a moderate to hard difficult and I wasn’t able to beat the game so far on 6 levels+. I wanted to mention this as I believe that it’s very important to have a sense of what your experience in the game would be even from an early start in the beta throughout the gameplay.

• Stat design –

I love it, PLEASE do not make any changes to the current stats as they enforce a real choice and serve to diversify the different play-stiles that the game could offer, however PLEASE remove the diminishing return on the stats as this contradicts the idea of diversity. By placing diminishing returns to starts you are forcing players to go nuts on their most important stats and just ignore or even worst, deal with stat mitigation. By removing the DR on the stats you will allow players to fine-tune their characters, which is the core purpose of being provided with a REAL and not an artificial (currently) choice.

In regards to stats, health regen is too week at the moment, it’s something that you get like on the side, it’s does not have this gravitational feel as crit strike or all resistance have when you are considering the different bonuses.

In addition please add some Force shield bonus to Wisdom as this will give the player the chance to go on Force shield/Aliment orientated build that will not revolve on crit and still have good survivability. With Wisdom at this state players that combine Mele weapons and Catalysts have a stat advantage.

• Passive Tree -

I think that is really well done and balance at the moment I would not make any changes and I DO LOVE that you have separated two different paths in the second ring for the different play-stiles. I have a DPS orientated section and tank orientated section, please continue this trend on the next ring so I can have BASE >> DPS >> TANK or BASE >> TANK >> DPS

• Active Skills –

Too few, even for a beta. Please add some Warcry type of skills, add auras, shield for the mage or something. At the moment there are barely any utility skills, absolutely no support/buffing skills, mitigation orientated etc. I would love to enter a dungeon and cast a primordial Warcry to boost my character or debuff my enemies before I swing my hammer.

And please do not introduce channeling skills or skills with cool-downs more than 10 seconds, this a bloody aRPG, not a MMO. I don’t want to stand in one spot to channel some funky skill or think when I should pop up my big CD spells.
I play WoW since TBC and I enjoy the game, for the most part, and when I feel like playing something more rotation orientated I will open up my Battle.net launcher, but please don’t make the same mistakes that D3 made. MMO and aRPG crossovers don’t work!

• Willpower/Rage –

I love the idea of the system, however when I created my Mage (Glorious at level 6 😊) I have a really hard time to regenerate my Willpower and there are currently very few mechanincs that improve on that. I never felt this problem with my Warrior, one swing of my two-hand weapon was filling 80% of my Rage bar if there were multiple enemies, but staff are so underwhelming in that regard. As I want to go pure mage I feel that I’m going to concentrate on potion use and/or have to make pauses after fight to regenerate Willpower if I don’t have a tool that will allow me to spend Rage quickly.

If you don’t want to buff the staffs then introduce some skills like Mental barrier for example that could give you X amount of Willpower regen and remove the delay between conversion, however it will burn though your force shield to do so, or something like that.

• Status Aliment and resistances –

I think that this is the part where you guys have gone overkill. Why do you need so many? Think of the expression – brilliant in its simplicity. When I was playing the game an year ago and saw the SAs I remembered an old D3 trailer that was showing such mechanics.

Lightening DMG had a chance for mini-stun
Fire DMG had a chance to ignite and DMG the enemies
Poison had a chance to weaken the enemies
Cold had a chance to slow enemies

And I don’t think that they had the “brilliant” idea of arcane back then, but my point is that 4 or 5 elements is enough, I don’t see the point of overcomplicating something that serves the same purpose.

You can make Umbra the ultimate power like Chaos DMG or something but overall –

Physical to Armor
Lightening, Cold, Fire, Poison to Elemental
Umbra = pure

is more than enough.

• Items

I haven’t put much thought on itemization to be honest, but I like that some of the Unique items have negative stats as well, but yeah maybe in another post.

P.S.

Don’t add MF as a suffix to the items, if you want to have it outside play-modes make it meaningful, like very few items or Sets that give you MF and to an meaningful extend, however it should come to a cost.

• Gems

Talk about nostalgia… So this is kind-a an enigma for me and I really hope that the reason why you have put SO much different Gems is that you plan to have a mechanic that will allow us to combine them and create some funky Gems that will give a variety of stats with diminishing returns. Otherwise I don’t see a point to have so many, same logic as above.

I hope to see Unique Gems, something in the lines of Jewels in D2.

• End Game –

The D3 Rift alternative is nice and I like how you have made the system with + Levels = + MF, however the reward system needs to be rethought. I would suggest gambling currency or crafting ingredients if you plan to introduce crafting.
D3 actually did this quite good in my mind with the Bloodshards.

Please bring back Arenas. It was fun, but make it like the ultimate challenge, like facing multiple bosses at ones with debuffs and if you manage to kill them you get something special.

• UI –

I haven’t put much though on that as well but one of the things that caught my eye is that the weapons do not attack-speed value, please add one.

As well as an option to see what are the min/max ranges on the suffixes on the items as well. I need to know If there is a better Unique item out there that I must find even if it’s only 1+ health above mine 😊