Unfortunately the problems with the talent tree (imo) are significantly more than vet “being weak” (To be clear I am not saying he is weak) In my experience with various people involved with the balancing/talents he was viewed primarily as “the problem” to be fixed, and you have a talent tree that reflects this.
All of his abilities that empower his “Vet” (ranged) gameplay are almost exactly the same as before but weaker (or gone altogether) with the exception of being able to apply 40% brittleness on fast firing weapons - almost no innovation like you see with other classes.
Shout of command, AKA Kruber ult, works great in V2, where virtually everything is melee, things take longer to kill and CC is more rare - guaranteed stagger is much stronger. In a land of Mutants, Ogryn, Monsters (all immune to Shout) hordes of ranged units, and being unable to use ult during other actions (like revive) a 9m stagger every 45 seconds is mostly a joke.
Infiltrate - Because Zealot can just do it better on a 30 second cooldown.
It lets you disengage… pushing the horde onto your allies, and offers almost nothing else other then refilling your toughness and you can only do it once a minute.
Giving flat toughness and damage are about as boring and vanilla as you can make an ultimate, and those are the primary effects of all three Vet ults.
These ults do not give new gameplay, and they do not enable new weapons/builds to any real extent.
Looking at the Aura’s they are exactly the same - very bland and either makes you unnoticeably faster, or do an imperceptible amount of increased damage. Even if buffed, as they are they will not expand build options like ults, or keystones (which vet didn’t get at all) of other classes because what they offer is very generic.
His toughness nodes are also at the bottom of the three branches, making it impossible to get all of them, and incredibly costly to get more then 2 - leaving him with the same base toughness as my Ogryn.
It also takes 24 points to get Always Prepared and Confirmed Kill (the only ammo option that works for all guns, and only good toughness regen talent the Vet has) which means there are VERY few build options unless you are willing to forgo one or both of those.
At which point you mostly have a bad Zealot. If you want a melee Vet build, I would love to see a lot of Hybrid options (like Agile Engagement) or other mechanics (like buffing allies per kill) to make his melee different from Zealot - more then more crits and damage. Currently melee Vet feels a lot like Zealot who has less damage, toughness, mobility and has no stamina.
I still don’t understand why they took away the base stats, 100 extra toughness, 10% crit, 7.5% toughness per kill to move him towards baseline while leaving his stamina as a joke? - do you want classes to all have a similar baseline or not?
They took away many things that made the Vet unique, nerfed what was left, and gave him some options to be a bland and bad Zealot.
As long as the Vet has access to strong ranged weapons, he will be a strong class. Headhunter III, Revolver, VId Recon lasgun, Helbore - all are incredibly strong, and as a result any Vet build based on those guns will be strong. He is strong cause the weapon is strong regardless of his talent tree, not because of it, and this feels bad.
The focus on the rework was clearly (to me) on “the problem” and not making the vet more fun and expanding his options. I do have some sympathy, Vet was very strong so I can understand wanting balance - it is just a shame (and not fun) that when everyone else gets new toys, the Vet gets a lump of coal, warranted or not.