Played for about 30 hours, figured it was time to give some feedback:
Crafting:
The planned system is good, but needs some tweaking and additions, mainly to crafting material costs and how much each mission gives you. This needs to be less grindy, as for solo players, which is many, many of them, you cant really regularly succeed in missions past difficulty 2, you need a group of friends/coordinated, experienced players to go higher and not get wrecked, and even then sense missions take longer its still super grindy. A method to reconfigure base stats such as damage and mobility would also be a great boon.
Armory/item store:
The store being a random pool of weapons is a horrible system and makes the grind issue much worse, you either have to wait an hour and hope a good weapon shows up, or you miss an item you want cuz you dont have enough currency and cant grind enough in time before the store rerolls, to fix this I would change the store so that all weapons and curios that you have unlocked are always available at a set price, but the rarity, perks, and stats of each weapon/curio you buy is random. For example, if it is unlocked, you can buy as many acatran lasguns as you want for the same price, but each you buy has different, random stats. This is a vastly superior system that still has the random element, but puts the player more in control and keeps them from feeling cheated. The contract currency random weapon system should remain, but should now act as a way to get a garenteed random high tier item if the current visible offerings by the squire are not ideal.
Item balance:
Im not going to go into specifics here, but buffs to less used weapons are VASTLY better than nerfs, this is a co-op game, real players aren’t being cheated by there being OP weapons and taking them away just ruins player enjoyment. Instead, buffing lesser used weapons to be visible alongside the meta is the ideal option.
Enemy Balance:
Overall enemy balance is good, however the rager needs some toning back, specifically its melee range and hyper oppressiveness, unless you are able to gun it down at range or ragdoll the rager, players dont have any way to really deal with them, making them unfun to fight, there needs to be a way, even if a very challenging one, to deal with a rager up close.
XP/progression:
Beyond level 18 to 20, the level up, grind is too much, along with missions not awarding enough ordo dockets and crafting materials, many players want to max out at a decent pace as for some class builds the needed feats and weapons only unlock at high levels and are very expensive, and the process to that point isnt the most enjoyable.
Class balance:
Ogryn needs a buff, physker and zelot are simply able to do what the big boy does outside of situations where a ton of stagger is needed. As with weapon balance, nerfs are STRONGLY advised against for similar reasons, buffs are much better.
UI:
Obviously, bugs need to be fixed, but in addition more info needs to be provided in many situations. Tooltips for weapon perks and blessings and other things, along with raw stat numbers to accompany or replace the very vague stat bars on weapons are desperately needed.
Cosmetics:
Having cosmetics tied to penances is an awesome system and should be expanded, having cosmetics tied to challenging achievements is a long missed system in games these days. More free cosmetics do need to be added however, notably weapon skins, but the selection of free apparel cosmetics also needs a boost.
Physkanium:
The meatgrinder should be able to spawn bosses, such are arch traitor kill targets, beasts of nurgle, and plague ogryns for testing, along with some system to put you in an arena with enemies that will fight back to practice.
That is all for now, out of all of my feedback I would say the store changes and grind reduction are most needed, the emperor protects.