So if we were at a life and death patch, and were to list, in order, priority, and PLEASE understand this is NO ONE but me asking, would it look like this?
1) Tie, Camera and game difficulty
2) UI
Again this is just me asking, and we're 5 days post launch, but that seems to me to be the brunt of conversation.
The camera needs adjusting, badly. Even if some people are okay with it, the majority of people have issues ranging from minor to severe, which indicates a pretty serious problem. I've worked in this industry for near a decade and to be honest I'm not entirely clear how it got through so much playtesting since I know this was in the oven for a pretty long time.
As far as difficulty is concerned, I think that needs to be expanded upon because there's some specific aspects that need corrected before you get into general game balance changes. Mainly, potions. You shouldn't be able to chain quaff health potions; you have an in-game cooldown on almost every kind of potion except the one that has the largest impact on difficulty, which I don't understand. This is something that you probably need to address across all current difficulties - just changing this for a future Nightmare mode doesn't really do much. All difficulties are affected by this and it has a lot of negative effects (nullifying the value of blocking, dodging, the Sorcery heal, etc). If the game had launched with a cooldown on health potions, I do not think you would have heard 90% of the difficulty complaints, but rather would have seen a lot of more specific feedback that would have helped you isolate things much faster. As it stands this needs to be cleared away before you get a solid data set as to what kind of balance issues really lie underneath this problem.
Moving beyond that, quite frankly I would not change any other aspect of the game balance in any of the current difficulty settings. The economy issues people talk about are kind of overblown; the cost of gear ramps up incredibly as you progress farther (I'm starting to come across 1,000,000 plus blue gear at vendors), and I don't think people are seeing that just yet. Wait for more feedback on that I would say, especially considering the truth of it is that you can't really empower a character that much through vendor purchases. I'm not sure Blacksmithing/Sagecrafting are actually
too powerful either, but I would say at the least that the early game gear you can craft could be toned down slightly. Personally, I would also consider changing Lockpicking so that you cannot pick "Hard" class chests until Advanced rank, and "Very Hard" without Master rank unless Prismere picks are consumed. Unlike Dispelling which has multiple opportunities for dialogue options, Lockpicking has no real benefit to skill point investment with how easy lockpicks are to acquire.
I would definitely rank Ability balance adjustments above Skill balance adjustments as things stand. We can definitely see some nasty outliers like Meteor, which even on Hard decimates if not outright kills pretty much everything. Tying this into UI issues, we really need a control scheme that adds a second set of 4 hotkeys. The potion radial can be moved to the free space on the d-pad, block can be moved to LB and we now have LT free to use for this. Aside from the camera this is currently by far my biggest functionality issue with the game. It would be a significant playability improvement. Also personally I would very much appreciate the ability to swap the stealth to LS and move sprint to RB, because even Rogues are likely to activate sprint more than they do stealth. That's ignoring the fact that other games (cough Skyrim) already make this a familiar control mechanism.