I just clocked 20 hours in the beta (I know, I know); there’s lots to praise, but I’d rather go over the things that need improvement, in my opinion. Played Sharpshooter for the most part, little bit of Zealot as well.
Feats don’t feel impactful enough; not sure about the level 30 Feats as I have yet to get there, but small boosts to Toughness regen or an 8% chance to recover grenades (which feels much, much lower in practice) just don’t affect your moment to moment gameplay. If the effect is so insignificant that you can barely tell which Feat you picked, it kind of defeats the purpose of customizable Feats. So far, Bio-Optic Targeting felt like the only talent that truly makes a differences, because it’s straight up mechanical.
Difficulty curve and risk / reward are off; Difficulty 2 might as well not exist - gives barely any more rewards than D1. Going up to 3 and beyond, the difficulty spike is pretty big in my opinion and your risk of failure increases exponentially. I think this might improve if the level requirements for the different difficulties were to be increased, so you get more experienced players on average. However, right now, the result is that most players seem to just grind D1 missions for XP and Cash.
Most ranged weapons are too slow to swap to; heavy weapons like Bolters being slow to swap to is perfectly fine, but “regular” weapons like Lasguns and Autoguns feel too clunky for what they do - the exception being the Recon Lasgun, which feels a lot more like I suppose “hybrid combat” should feel like. Las Pistols and such could have their dodge increased to compensate for other weapons getting less clunky.
Autoguns feel mostly pointless; the Braced Autogun is a bit of an exception due to its great damage against armoured targets and high DPS in general, but the others just feel like they’re fundamentally worse than Lasguns. Smaller clips, lower ammo capacity, more recoil, it just doesn’t feel good.
The Combat Blade is too good, comparatively; it has insane dodge, still does decent enough damage and you don’t need to mess around with clunky special abilities to use it to its fullest. Not sure whether it should be nerfed or other melee weapons should be buffed, though.
We need a menu / hotkeys for the hub functions; as much as I appreciate the hub, the novelty wears off quick and running from the spawn to the gear vendor and back to the mission selection is just becoming more and more tedious.
Weapon progression needs refinement; part of my issue is that the variety of weapons is dramatically improved from VT2 (which is fantastic), but only a small selection feels good to me and there’s no way to go after one weapon type specifically. I understand that that might be intentional to force the player to branch out, but I’d love, say a “Priority Acquisition” option that increases the rate at which a certain weapon type pops up in the vendor’s inventory.
Rename “Discard” to “Sell” or “Salvage” for equipment; it’s woefully unintuitive to call it “Discard”, as that implies just removing the item from your inventory without any compensation.
Communicate information more clearly; I know this has been brought up extremely frequently, but random symbols describing weapon combos, bars that work in conjunction with item level to denote weapon stats, unexplained effects (“Finesse”, “Collateral” etc.) and no way to know how a weapon behaves even remotely without buying it, that’s all stuff that ought to be more transparent. I get that it might hamper exploration, but I think the benefits of at least having the option outweigh the negatives.
Some Specials need retuning / limiting; Poxdogs move so erratically that they seem to glitch through objects, Mutants bee-line towards their pre-determined target no matter what (I’ve seen one circle down multiple flights of stairs past the entire squad to follow a mate who jumped down) and there’s situations that just seem like they allow for no counterplay, i.e. Bursters spawning in very enclosed areas, multiple snipers spawning in an open arena while you’re fighting a horde, that sort of stuff.
Bosses seem overtuned; by that, I don’t mean Plague Ogrins or Beasts of Nurgle, but the Assassination targets. It’s fine that they’re hard to do, but their raw stats (damage output, health) and the sheer amount of hordes and specials that spawn on top just makes them far more difficult than other mission types.
Suppression is broken; not much more to say, it seems like it barely works at all. There’s some weapons that apparently have massively increased suppression effect and they do something, but for the most part, enemies don’t care about incoming fire and continue to hit you with the accuracy of a Space Marine Captain or Custodian instead of some Traitor Guard chaff.
Grenades need a shorter fuse; this isn’t even about the Penance, but I generally feel like grenades just idle for too long. At least with the quickthrow, it should blow up sooner. Right now, it takes so long for a grenade to blow that an entire horde can move past it (or get cleaved down). Being this slow makes it extremely hard to use a grenade reactively.