I just started an Auradin Pally since I saw your post. They will nerf this I'm sure. But goddamn it's fun as hell to play. In less than a day I am pushing Ubers after being away for more than a year. Just learning what was what may have been half my time. I STILL have no idea WTF the corrupted items in my inventory are for, along with a bazillion runes. Though I think the runes are one in a slot gives resource and the other uses that resource.
I tried making a shield bash build...It plays too clunky, but it does work.
Man, they added a bunch of nice quality of life things since I last played. Like saving your profiles.
Overall I'm having a great time...What was everyone's beef with the game again? It's really fun. Not too complicated. And the combat feels great.
Primary beefs:
They make OP classes or OP meta builds for each season to make people think they are having fun. This has been their thing since the first season.
Seasons themselves are just copy paste from the previous seasons. The last two seasons they used the exact same mechanics but only changed the names on everything.
They make changes and then undo them later on. They can't keep track of the WHY they do things, and some seasons later they get rid of those changes.
Dumb things like having two teams doing seasons. One team does even seasons, the other team does odd seasons. They work from different code bases instead of a unified single code base. What happens then is Team A makes fixes that make it only into their own code base. Team B does the same thing. Sometimes changes get merged between the two teams, sometimes they do not. Bug fixes get fixed, code merged in...then merged out or excluded on the other team's code base.
Loot. ARPG's are based on loot, and loot in this game sucks. Boring, bland, unimaginative. Not only that, they made getting good loot a complete grind. At first, good loot was rare, then they jacked up the drop rates, then they nerfed the drop rates except for one boss that you have to grind boring fucking gameplay loops to get the mats for.
Altering loot via masterworking/enchanting is trash. It's just +gooderer or +betterer stats or a narrow range of useful effects. These don't take builds in new directions.
Another example of stupid decision making. They changed the paragon XP curve so only try hards and poop sockers could max it. Casual gamers got thrown under the bus. Not playing an OP meta class/build? No max Paragon for you.
Basically, clueless and rudderless game designers and leadership that has no idea how to extend gameplay beyond superficial +gooderer and betterer stat increases.
There's a lot more, but meh.