Good since now i have a bit of time i will go deeper into character and items and the problems with BT4. I have also checked in the Official inXile BT forum if the people have the same concerns that i do and the answer to that is yes.
Character:
Every character has 3 places for their active combat abilities / skills, that is more then just attack, but in the case of the Practitioner it is rather low. Also the number of spells is also not that high compared to the previous installations in the franchise and it seems that even BT 2005 had higher number of spells. BT I-III had many spells for the casters and in my opinion this should somehow preserved. Perhaps the current spells grow with each level in strength according to INT or STR, but i cannot confirm this from my playthrough and if they would then the spells would retain their value. I know that it is rather unlikely that this will be changed by inXile, but investing skill points into additional slots would have been great, at least for the Bard and Practitioner. One additional ability slot of is from a utility item slot, where you can store health potions or caltrops or booze for the bard or even a spell from an item that you can use in combat.
The skills can be mostly devided into active skills including spells, passive skills and bonus skills to INT, CON, STR, Spellpoints and Armor.
The skill trees are grouped in Attack (Bard, Fighter and Thief), Defense (B, F, T and P), Command (F), Spellcraft (P), Meditation (P), Bladecasting (P), Music (B), Brewing (is crafting with booze for the B), Subterfuge (T) and Crafting (F,P and T). But even if the classes share the same grouping, then this group for the Fighter and Thief has the same skills and also different skills. For example the Fighter can use two-handed swords, while the Thief can use two weapons (main and off-hand). So this results that besides crafting, which is for all classes equal besides the Bard, there is only around 20%-70% intersection in Skills in a skill group. Sadly i think that the skill groups are notinfluenced by the race of the character and it would be nice to have special skill trees in certain groups for "blunt weapons dwarf Fighters" or "Bladecasting elves Practitioners" or "2handedsword human Fighters".
Btw.: the party members do not die if their HP are reduced to 0, instead they are unconcious till the end of the fight and are revived after the fight with 25% (or so) of their health. The amount of HP for as an example the Fighter is much lower then in BT I-III.
What i miss is also the monk class where you could fight without weapons and dealt much more dmg with his fists.
Concern:
There is a thing that shouldn't be in the released version and that is that you can remove all the invested skill points for free any time you want and how often you want it to. Such a thing should be restricted to the review board and should cost much.
Items:
Food is crucial in BT4, because it regenerates health for the entire party and after each fight i was eating bread or apples or cabbages to heal my entire party. I have forgotten once to eat-heal my part and that resulted nearly in a lost fight, where i have survived with just one party member.
Health potions heal one specific party member and their value is mostly in battle where you can heal a wounded party member.
Caltrops are great, and i have spread them very often with the trow Thief to weaken enemies when they entered the front row, from the back row. The funny thing is that even after the fight they are still lying there on the ground.
One of the tactics changing elements were the boots and i mean extremely changing. In my case this were the apprentice slippers or so, for just 40 coins. This slippers gave one spellpoint for the Practioner if the practioner walked a step and since the elven "The Green Lady (wife of the the green knight?)" gained one spellpoint per round for free this resulted in one "Dragon Breath" each round dealing at least 16 HP of damage.
Concern:
The armor and weapons have a very large influence on CON, STR and INT and that is a bit detrimental in my opinion, since this are also core values that determine how much damage you can sustain before you go down or deal to your enemies.
