I dont want to sound like i am just whinging on the forum, but off the top of my head, these are the things that really stuck out to me in terms of weird and questionable design. I probably missed a bunch of stuff that other people have experienced.
Ill throw in some of the stuff i enjoyed at the end to make this post a bit less lopsided towards negativity.
The bad (In no particular order):
-Each character has their own currency pool and bounties, making things very grindy and soft locks you to a character until you have either done the grind required for the materials or currency you need for that character, or until you have finished your bounties, or have just given up. Its such a step backwards from the flexibility you had when it came to what class you wanted to play a few round on that VT2 had. I would really like to spend time on other characters without incurring some kind of artificially created penalty for not sticking to one particular character.
-There is a lot to be said about the armory and how gear is handled and none of it is particularly positive, but one of the things that sticks out to me is having to cycle between characters every hour to check the shop inventory, this is a tedious mechanic. I am hoping that the fully unlocked crafting system will alleviate some of the randomness and constant monitoring of the shop, but as it is at the moment, its pretty bad and feels like just another chore you need to do before you can play.
-Some of the requisitorium bounties have ridiculously grindy objectives like finishing 25 missions, or you get objectives that needs to be finished on a map thats not even in the rotation, and somtimes ends up being on a difficulty level you do not wish to play. Finishing bounties on all characters seems unrealistic in terms of time spent.
-Mission length can start to drag, it sometimes feels like i am playing skittergate over and over again. Also, artificially padding your missions length by adding several rotations of scan objectives or minigames gets pretty tedious after a while.
-Anemic amounts of loot drops after finishing a mission, and when something does drop, its mostly bad quality items.
-Poxburster explosion size is to big when compared to the spawn points on the map, map layout, and the amount of enemy clutter you often experience. A lot of the time you are more or less guaranteed to take damage from this particular enemy simply due to the fact that it spawned so close to you that even if you dodge away from it while killing it, you will still be within its AOE range. And of course the damage goes through toughness.
-Slow and clunky weapon functionality has been used as a way to balance certain weapons, which makes the natural flow between ranged and melee combat feel laborious.
-Due to the lack of scaling of brain burst on higher difficulties, the class feels somewhat hamstrung since you cannot one shot human sized specials on heresy or above, and that is on top of already having to deal with a slow casting time, high peril generation and a limited dodge range that leaves you vulnerable to attacks. Basically this ability goes from being an important mechanic for sniping specials and elites on malice, to a filler ability you force yourself to use to gain stacks on higher difficulties.
-Flinch, stagger and push back from ranged mobs feels very clunky and jarring to the game play, this is not about the difficulty of the mechanic, its about how the game feels when having to deal with this mechanic.
-Chip damage through toughness, just why? You have a class that has class mechanics that revolves around being on low hp. This just does not feel like it was thought out properly.
-1 class per character arc type.
-Very low level requirements for joining into higher difficulty missions, this one is a bit of a double edge kind of thing, on one hand there are good players that dont need the levels to perform, and levels are not always the best indicator for how good a player is.
But on the other hand, it makes playing pub games on heresy+ even more of a gamble when it comes to your team mates, all in all, a bit annoying but not to much of an issue.
-Specials dodging in and out of closing doorways.
-The story of the game seems very slim so far, especially considering that Dan Abnett worked on this.
The good (Also in no particular order):
-Game looks great and has good visual designs that makes some of the maps feel like you are in an actual hive city or a factorium. Played a mission that ended up in a huge open space where you needed to disable some anti air defenses so backup could land, and it had a pretty epic feeling to it.
-Combat can feel very satisfying when its not hampered down by balancing mechanics, weapons refusing to swap or the ever present staggers.
-Most of the weapons feels great to use if you take weapon swap mechanics out of the equation, the chain weapons in particular are really nice and visceral, just like they should be.
The bolter feels great when you mag dump into a group of specials and normal enemies.
I also like that weapons like the chainsword, chainaxe and the power sword has a charge up ability that changes the efficiency of the weapon, its a neat little mechanic that adds a bit of depth to the combat.