First off - Great Post!

It is my great hope that Larian and the community can have a meaningful and productive relationship throughout this open access period by channeling discussion through posters like Hassat Hunter. I stood up from my chair as I read his list and grabbed my paper that had many of the same exact suggestions written down.

What I am scared of - deeply terrified of - is that this incredible world with beautiful detail and rich story will be marred by a system that does not match it quality for quality.

The difficulty is that you will receive a tremendous amount of feedback, and 90% of that feedback should be ignored. Figuring out what the 10% is will be the true challenge, not just for Larian but for us as a community. We can drown out posts like Hassat's or we can add to them and refine them.

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With all that said I'd like to emphasize a few of Hassat's points with my opinions, and add some random suggestions that come to mind.

1. Large bonuses for single point investments. Encouraging players to drop "one point wonders" into their build may seem like a good way to get well rounded characters but it is not a satisfying way of building them. A lot of the feedback from my personal group of friends has included frustration over feeling the need to put points in everything and the inability to focus and feel accomplished in one area. In D:OS1 the strongest builds seemed to just get EVERYTHING and and left you unable to even define your character. There should be meaningful tradeoffs other than order acquired.

2. Option to keep "Alt" held down would be great. ALSO - if alt isn't held down you can't interact with items (pickup by accident a red item). No game have I ever played where I felt threat around vendors that I might accidentally steal from them. This isn't a fun thing and ends up being really annoying.

3. Can we PLEASE get a website with all the numbers that are up to date with the latest patch. I understand that during this alpha/beta phase things will likely change too fast and so I'm more talking about preparation for later stages. Do you remember the arreat summit from d2? All the wikis on D:OS1 are out of date with heavily conflicting information. I've put in some work to fix a lot of them but can't help but think this is the sort of thing you guys should do for us. :)

4. Related - do not HIDE numbers from us. Do not state things like "improves crit chance" without saying exactly how much. Off the top of my head tooltips could have 3 options under game play. "DO NOT SHOW" "SIMPLE TOOLTIPS" "EXTENDED TOOLTIPS" the extended shows every number and the exact effect, while simple would say the "improves crit chance"

5. Please give us all combat information. Hassat mentions inability to hover over enemy combat statuses. I don't have an easy solution for you on this one, I know it could be a pain but it is very important. Somewhat related - in D:OS1 the status affect durations would often be wrong in multiplayer sessions. This is a critical bug to fix. (not talking about early resists or anything like that, like bless says 5 rounds but I know its been on me for 4 rounds already and will wear off next round).

6. Give players information about progression during character creation or even better an in game information button. Something that tells us when we get combat/social abilities talents and attributes.

7. Is it completely necessary to keep the current system of Con Vitality and Hit Points? I've never seen a system needlessly complicate an incredibly simple mechanism. Sometimes the standard is really just best, rather than reinventing the wheel. I'd recommend using the term health or hit points (vitality is just weird) and allowing con to increase your base hit points. Of course this base is buffed on each level up by a percentage. Having a separate ability to buff hit points further seems odd, and should probably be left to a talent or two. The vernacular can be distracting moreso to the casual player.

8. Lonewolf vs One Man Army. I need numbers! I liked Lonewolf except that I felt it was a bit too strong in the hit point arena. For most players lonewolf was very easy to understand and really was an intriguing option - especially since it was available from level 1. I don't think you should throw this away so casually. MANY of us want to control less characters and it feels GREAT to get a buff for getting to play our way. We can make the buff smaller but as it stands now I feel compelled to run with 4 characters until level 8 - else I'm cheating myself. For me and my friends this is a horrible change. ---> Thats not to say one man army couldn't be a complimentary talent of sorts. Expand on the lonewolf setup. It would also allow you to restrict power earlier. AGAIN - don't feel compelled to overpower these. The previous lone wolf could have given 40% bonus hit points and still been amazing.

9. Dialog boxes just seem poorly designed. Sometimes the text is at the top and I'm constantly needing to scroll down. One suggestion I have is to make sure there is a gap between the bottom of the screen and the text so as not to give the illusion that more text is down. This is another one of those "don't reinvent the wheel moments" I'd take a look at how other popular games have managed their dialog to look good. If you want to get really creative give us a resizing option on it to. And as a side note - all of us love that multiplayer characters aren't forced into dialogs with the main character. We can be managing our bags or exploring while one of us is handling dialogs - so good job on that. (an area where many multiplayer games fail)

10. This one you can ignore but I thought it might be an interesting fix to the one point wonders. Maybe create a talent called "Incredible Focus" that enhances the effect of skill areas if you have taken points in 2 or fewer. I'm not sure if this is ideal but I feel like its a step in the right direction for those that don't want to feel like they have to do everything.

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Just general advice. A good way to balance a game is to let power gamers run rampant over it and basically destroy the game through optimal builds. Set up metrics to measure success of these gamers such as completion time, average battle length in turns or damage output per turn. Evaluate this data and then tune down what they use and tune up the things they always ignore. Its an iterative process that is made easier by having easily understood mechanics. Not everyone is a power gamer - but having power gamers set the balance does not compromise the experience of casual gamers. All gamers benefit from a well balanced game with myriad viable options.

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Thx for any of you who read all of that, sorry for the wall of text. I'm an old man who has played a lot of games in his life and when I find a company that seems to have captured something special in the RPG realm, it is worth my valuable time to share my thoughts. I hope to make more (hopefully shorter) posts in the future!