Just my thoughts on respawns:
There are arguments pro respawns (world is more alive), there are arguments against respawns ("Omg, not again these two stupid level 3 orcs whom I have already fought 14 times...")... There are players who love grinding and respawns, there are players who just hate it - we can debate our preferences forever without coming to a conclusion.
There are games in which respawns work well and there are games in which they are just out of place. And I think, D:OS is one of the games in which respawns will hardly work. The reason for this is the following: One of the main elements of the combat system in D:OS is the interaction with the environment. Every encounter so far has been carefully designed and placed (including all the barrels, surfaces, crates to set afire, obstacles etc.). So, once the fight is over, the whole scenery will be changed (barrels are destroyed, crates are burnt down, surfaces modified, vaporized or created). If you put in just random respawns you have to sacrifice this whole mechanics of the interaction with the environment - and the random fights will/can become very boring indeed (just shooting or hitting in a turn-based manner without any strategy involved does not sound very appealing...). So, you can certainly add in random encounters into the game via modding, but I honestly doubt whether that can be done in a way that the fights do not become pretty boring and hence just a nuisance...
