First let me preface this with how much I am enjoying this game even in early access. While it is certainly impossible to recapture the tabletop DnD experience in a game, Larian is taking what may be the best shot I have seen. As the goal is to stay close to DnD mechanics I do have some concerns.
Action Economy: The plethora of bonus actions that all characters are given access to is a major problem. Disengage, shove, hide all need to be actions and disengage needs to be separated from jump which is pretty interesting as a bonus action. These abilities as bonus actions are major class features of the rogue and monk. And bonus action shove is exclusive to those who take shield master. Making this available to all characters lessens the flavor and effectiveness of those classes. It also makes the game very unbalanced as it is not difficult to keep your entire party hidden and attack every round with the enemy unable to respond.
Reactions and other trigger abilities: This I understand must be a difficult mechanic to make work and the current system while a good attempt is going to have major issues when certain very important spells and class features are added. Let's look at Shield. This reaction spell is an essential spell for the wizard and any Gish type character. Being able to either have always trigger or never trigger is not going to work as you will burn through your spell slots. While this may work for opportunity attacks and even for the war caster feature whenever the melee cantrips are added the current system leaves a lot to be desired.
This will become a far bigger problem when we look at the Paladin and what is the defining feature of the class, divine smite. The closest thing I see in game to this currently is the battlemaster maneuvers. The current solution is you choose to activate the ability before you attack. This greatly weakens these abilities as they should be able to applied when you hit and more importantly for divine smites when you critical. This forces any character with these types of abilities to burn through their resources extremely quickly without much control.
Possible Solution for trigger abilities: I am not a game designer and do not understand all the intricacies in coding and such things but I am a gamer and can think of one mechanic that could work well for this, quick time events. Having a quick time event anytime an ability is triggered could be effective and possibly more engaging for players as they would have only a minimal window to react. I do not see this slowing down gameplay and could be a good solution for the plethora of class abilities that work this way.
Character Creation: My big concern here is point buy. We long ago banned point buy at our tables as we found it to be a stifling method of making characters. It leads to constant dump statting so every character is dumb as a rock and limits creative mixing of race and class. It also makes creative multiclassing all but impossible as your stats don't support it. The option of rolled stats needs to be included. This allow players to make the characters they want.
Immersion Issues: This is minor stuff that I expect will get cleaned up as the game moves closer to completion. Examples: weapons hanging on your back without scabbards, longswords on back but not on hips, no quivers, dead bodies never going away.
Thank you for the work you are doing and I look forward to seeing this game live up to its potential.
