At first, I thought the skill/leveling system would be amazing

Erease life nodes. Rework of the flat amount of life gain for each class. Make passive stats(str,dex,int) stronger.

There you go poe you have now real build diversity

One of the things I want to say about this is that damage honestly doesn't mean anything in this game. That is the primary reason that HP nodes are so valuable and why survival through those health nodes is so important. Armor and Evasion scale so terribly and if you actually graphed the increased efficiency per life point with Armor or Evasion versus just straight HP stacking, there's probably close to a 40-60% efficiency gap.

I made a Marauder with the intent to simply take every life node as efficiently as I possibly could, take no offensive nodes other than strength and see how far I got. I wasn't surprised at how durable I was because that was the point, what I was surprised about was how damned easy everything was to kill when you can sit there and face tank it. 1 shotting mobs and 2-3 shotting blue mobs in a lvl 44 zone at lvl 36 with absolutely no survival problems. I only have 500 armor on that character yet I've got like 2200 HP at like lvl 44 with 120-130 HP/sec Regen 5% life steal and life on hit support gems.

The problem is that offensive nodes have no efficiency gain over defensive nodes, in fact they provide you with worse overall efficiency. My above character should have loads of problems actually killing things because he focused so much on defensive stats. There should be a balance to going all defensive or all offensive, something along the lines of going all offensive and you die really easy and go all defensive and you can never kill anything. The problem is that there is no balance, you see the effects of going all offensive, but the effects of going all defensive have all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks.

This game felt extremely different in closed beta 6-12 months ago. I played off and on so I didn't see or know every single patch and change but I did experience the overall change in the game play experience over that 6-12 months. What I can say is that the game went from a challenging ARPG that focused on build diversity and efficiency to breed success, to an ARPG that is trying way too hard to be extremely difficult and ultimately gave up any semblance of balance or diversity that it had.

I like the game, It has a good feel and it's fun to play. One of the main reasons I found it fun to play during Closed Beta was due to the diversity in how I could customize my characters and seeing the many builds and options I could effectively and efficiently utilize. One of the main reasons I find it fun to play in Open Beta is the memory of being able to do that, and that's slowly fading.