First impressions regarding balance

[vcntmnd]

In no particular order... a few early thoughts.

First, I like it, great atmosphere and I very much appreciate the more mature themes over the old IE games, the art is great, combat is fun.

A small amount of diminishing returns on particularly high/low stats would be a good thing, and would serve to make varying builds more 'in line' with each other.

Combat is much too fast, and on a related note heavy/DPS style weapons WAY outperform lighter or more defensive options, in some cases 5-10x the DPS. Because of the exponential value of multiple units, (think command and conquer, where 2 tanks are 4x as strong as 1 tank) even a 10% DPS increase is valuable on a unit that isn't taking damage. I strongly suggest bringing the offensive options in line with defensive options. All things being equal a defensive fighter should win a one on one fight by a significant margin, simply because damage per second is so inherently powerful by its very nature.

Also contributing to the above, the game is very alpha-strikey. While this was fairly true in IE games and should remain true for specific classes/builds, a good fight is when you don't know if you're going to win until the very end. Stacking armor debuffs, bleeds, and more back-end damage effects can go a long way toward improving this.

Anyway, great job, I look forward to the next patch (and I hope its not ALL bugfixes )