Wow, awesome game it's rare when I'll play a Hgame purely because I enjoy it so much. The music, the combat system, cursed loot mechanics all of it is great.
Here's some of my thoughts on the game balance. I might be totally wrong on many things but this has just been my experience. I played beta 1.00
-AoE damage is OP for most of the game I ran a party of Ranger - Cleric - Paladin - Warrior though I'll probably replace the Paladin soon with another warrior, I can usually burn through most encounters in 2-3 turns just by spamming archer's Suppressing Fire, cleric's Holy Fire, and warrior's Cleave. I think archer is fine, but I think warrior's cleave should have it's damage nerfed slightly so that it does half as much as slash, or slightly more than half. In my current game I've min-maxed damage a bit but Slash does 9-14, and cleave does 7-11 there's almost never a reason for me to not use cleave. I also feel like cleric's Holy Fire is a bit too OP and should be moved to Mage instead swapping Mage's FireStream, for Cleric's Holy Fire. So that instead Cleric can only hit 2 targets.
-Alchemist needs a buff it just feels like a much worse version of ranger it's overall DPS is probably higher in the long run, but it just feels worse to bring and ranger can bring all the same utility without any of the downsides making it much more consistent in fights. Personally I would either 1) change how blind works on Alchemist to be a stacking debuff starting at -25% accuracy, then -50%, then -75% etc... forcing you to reload to clear it all. 2) Remove blindness all together and just set all Alchemist gun attacks to have 75% accuracy or 3) give Alchemist an ammo system instead of blindness and after every 2 shots needs to use reload.
-Noble feels weird to use. It looks like it's suppose to be an alternative to Rogue where you are shifting your position backward and forward between the 2nd and 3rd ranks however doing this greatly limits your choices for what you can have in those positions. If you're using Noble that means you can only really use another Noble or a Rogue for that 2nd/3rd position spot that will get swapped between, all other classes have much more stringent frontline/backline requirements. The damage is also not very good compared to other classes the only thing it really has going for it is good access to Riposte which a rogue can do better and has easier access to, not to mention doing better damage. Personally I would add a class upgrade option that gives noble a 25-50% chance to double hit on attack.
Also a few questions/comments I had
-Personal Development goals seem to be bugged, they will randomly stop and start working and I can't figure out why. Loading game seems to briefly fix it.
-What is the slave job? Is it same as prisoner? Or is it unimplemented?
-When I enter an area some of my party members have "!" over them and I can't figure out what that's suppose to be.
-How much of the bestiary is in the game? I have found 36% so far are all 100% implemented or will they be added later?
-In future harder dungeons could you allow multiple enemies to grapple? Or make it a menu option? With only 1 grapple allowed any reasonably mid-late game party is fairly easy to break that grapple.
Thanks again sorry for wall of text had a lot of thoughts about this game and I've played it to day 150 at this point.