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After a bunch more plays:

It's very easy to lose in the first few stages if you are aggressively trying to spec towards a winning strategy - seemingly if you don't do this your runs almost never end in success. Once I got the snowball going (usually, gold mine > walky talky > salamander & campsite > 0 cost pips > wrench) it was quite easy to win. 

This leads to a high level of difficulty that is driven more by randomness and less by player choices. If you had a more certain path to a given build it might feel better for players, even if the game were made more difficult numbers-wise.

I found this quite fun, but very difficult. I'm feeling that I lack agency, as I know a few combination of cards that can let me win (mostly, combining the campfire and the salamander), but I don't feel that most runs have a pathway to victory - I find myself having most runs end at the stage where you need 90 score, but the two runs that won were super easy because of the available upgrades. I think it would feel better if it were a little bit less random (possibly with some additional difficulty to balance more choice).

I think that I'd prefer to hit unaware enemies as well. I find that using a burst of SP to strafe down single enemies is DEX classes version of freeze - it makes it trickier when you need to get aggro first. Sometimes I am strafing and sleep bombing and do want to keep sleeping enemies from attacking, but that seems like a minority of cases.

Thanks! Yes, it does seem that some of the skills need to be boosted, and others pulled back. I did a successful fire mage run today and, again, was able to coast to victory on Dominate and Freeze. 

For Dominate, I could see having a duration as a way to bring it back into balance. Possibly it could have a maximum number of hitpoints which can be controlled at one time (currently, it makes encounters with big, scary high-HP monsters semi-trivial).

For Freeze, possibly frozen enemies could be immune or resistant to damage. Logically, I don't know whether it makes more sense to take more, less, or the same when encased in a block of ice. From what I can tell, it's main usage is easily killing single target enemies, not freezing them in place for any other tactical reason.

Alternately, one could boost the damage output of Tornado, Fire Sphere, etc. 

Another issue is that STR and DEX classes don't have extremely powerful skills to cross-class into. Maybe Strafe Attack and Bear Trap would count?

I have been kind of in the dark about which skills are worthwhile and have stumbled my way through. I would be interested in what people think is the optimal skill progression for their favourite class. 

I am also finding that some skills way out of whack in terms of power level, even at the same level of skill. For example, I don’t think that the flaming battle ball is anywhere near freeze and dominate - I’ve found that my successful caster runs are ones where I can pick up those two skills from a tome or librarian.

This one was fairly easy with a barbarian - 

After quite a few tries I managed to snag a win with a dexterity, intelligence, and strength character.  I definitely found it easiest to win with the ranger as they have high dps, good crowd control, and incentives to build up a big pool of speed points. Especially they had an easier time with the first few levels (I find that I most commonly die on level 2 to normal battles with frogs or bees, then my character powers up and the 3rd dungeon and side dungeons are easier).

I found the recent change that makes the tome of knowledge grant you a free point in the skill made the game a lot more manageable, as you could afford to spec up in both your offensive skills and passive/mobility skills.

All in all this is a very good and addictive game - at first it seemed impossible but after learning the mechanics and some basic builds it becomes very doable.

PS: the comments above about the duelist being overpowered are a little bit hard for me to believe - I struggle getting past the first couple dungeons without any crowd control or ranged attacks. Maybe they require a higher skill floor.