Thanks for your feedback.
To be honest, the goal with the starting sets is to give some variety when you’re replaying act 1. They are not made to be equal nor viable until the end of the game, but just give you other things to experiment with so going through act 1 is more interesting.
One of Gwen’s locked spell sets gives her Dragon Slave, a 4 gem spell you have to cast 3 times before it nukes everyone. It’s probably not as reliable as the ice start, but It’s fun to play around with having an alternative win condition so I made it a set. I figure if they're not your thing you'll just go with something else.
Something I don’t think is obvious in the demo is that later acts have their own spells and badges and the base power is higher. They’re not always straight upgrades, especially if you've got some synergies going on, but there is an expectation you won’t be too precious about shedding them.
I have done “get powered up and cast lots of things” much better on Aerfen and maybe Magic Dismissal needs a reevaluation. Some badges are amazing on it though, like you can reduce the stone count and have a 1-stone spell with Repeat and, for reasons I can’t get into, that’s not too rare.
The Channel starter having at least one fight where you wait for your imp to do everything can be a bit boring, you can x3 speed or take the skip modifier but it’s still fundamentally alternating empty turns. And given Channel is a reliable generator, I could see people sitting through that…
I think 3 health is a good number for Scry tbh. It is often useful to know who you’re fighting when picking spells or placing badges (ex: remove prism for mushroom). I do agree 3 acorns is way too much, you’re basically picking that with the same mentality as “no scrying nodes” and I don’t think I need two of those.
Anyway, I don’t want to come across as defensive, I appreciate the feedback. It is interesting to hear your thoughts and I appreciate you have put sooo much time into the demo!
For random encounters what enemies you fight is determined by budget, act and battle level (orb colour, basically!). “Enemies can appear anywhere” means only the budget is checked, so you can see enemies from any act (and summons). It’s more pronounced later on when the budgets are higher!