i waited until i got to the end of the story to write from a new players perspective.
Overall there are things i enjoyed and things i found lacking.
I made a void knight , who would use a sword and shield - along with warpath.
bug:
often the pathing while holding the mouse down gets stuck on terrain for a half second.
some quests do not update to the correct location to go to in the early game - causing confusion. That is to say the marker updates but not the description on the area to be.
Early game:
The movement speed felt slow. It should be slightly higher overall in my opinion , especially when you have to back track out of corners, which there are many of. I do like that there are paths to go off to explore though.
The balance felt fair , where i stuggled for the first few levels as i learned what the skills did.
Mid Game:
once you have a few skills leveled, the game becomes a bit too easy with one exception - mana control. There are only a few ways to regenerate mana , and most did not seem very adequarte.
I did end up using volatile reversal to some effect - though it did not seem consistent (having picked up the +2 seconds on tree). Often id rewind time and be at less mana then i though , or more mana. I suspect something is doing damage to mana overtime , but i could not find any information that would shed light on this idea.
It would be nice to have some additional sources of mana regen earlier on gear as we do for life regen.
Late Story:
At this point , it feels like you have outscaled the game as you have some t3 crafted gear and the mobs can bearly dent through the defensive capabilities you now have as a warrior class.
Skill Tree.
It would be nice to have a second bar or an inactive slot to assign a skill to. Sometimes i want to try out different skills , but i do not want to have to loose all progress on a skill i have been using. Having a place to park a leveled skill opposed to loosing all progress would be nice.
Some of the skill trees abilities are lacking in either mechanics or power comparative to others. While warpath offers some mana regen or mana reduction - the cost is quite high to achieve either. where 15% is only +1.5 from the base regen you have. Also the two handed options seem much weaker then going 1 hand and taking damage nodes. I am not sure on the abyssal node part , as i focused more on strength - where this seemed to go with attunement?
The upper half of the void knight dissapointed me. The void well seemed interesting - until you realize ther is no way to see what number of stacks you have on , and there is only one skill that you can get to cost 40 mana+. The other top end of the tree does nothing for movement so it can be ignored. instant kill , sounds nice but most monsters are going to die with 20% life left anyways due to raw damage. Absorbing health is interesting but the pools are small , and devoting skill points to mitigation of damage seems better then constantly trying to kill something to heal it.
Hopefully the trees are fine tuned to be more interesting/useful.
though i have just started endgame, i am enjoying it.
The crafting system is very enjoyable , and gives a sense of accoplishment when you hit t4s and t5s on gear.
i look forward to what tweaks you may add to the classes and game. Perhaps even expanding on skills available for each class.
I hope that you will add more time swapping throughout the story , as a game about time travel seemed to lack alot of time traveling to get things done.
lastly , i hope that the mtx will not be crazily expensive like poe. I would be more apt to spend more if i could get more for the points.