Wall o' text.
- Level 10 skills still having high failure chances A) Makes the player investment feel worthless and B) Promotes save scumming. Nobody wants to throw tons of points into a skill just to have it go tits up more than half the time. When I played through Arizona solo I already realized you don't even need 90% of the skills in the game. If I still have an opportunity to fail something I've invested a ton into, I just ask myself what's the fucking point, because an investment into weaponry certainly would not have failed. And if you think I'm complaining here you just need to look at the fact that the dialogue skill usages aren't rolls of the dice, but instead operate on a graduated/binary system completely divorced from the rest of the game's structure.
- Armor makes no sense. Others have touched upon this a lot.
- AP usage across the entire game is completely out of whack. Lemme explain. Crouching uses 2-AP. Standing back up uses 2-AP. This makes crouching a heavy investment (4-AP total, taking into account that you crouch and then at some point uncrouch). Moving into cover and acquiring better cover/aim-bonus than crouching requires no inherent AP and neither does leaving cover. Meaning cover comes at a premium in terms of AP usage, even if technically speaking you are couching behind cover. Right now, I feel like when you use crouch you basically stay crouched, because to stand back up is frequently enough AP usage to really mitigate what you can do next. So, instead, I pretty much never crouch, because the superior option is to either find cover (obviously, I suppose), or to just run backwards and reset. Crouch should be a standby between mobility, but right now I feel like it staples you with its AP-usage. The fact crouch gives the same bonuses whether you're out in the open or behind a heap of technically "non game-cover" trash is just silly. Crouch in and of itself feels like a mechanic developed when there wasn't cover-blobs to stick yourself to. Most games implement crouch in a literal sense - you crouch behind stuff. WL2's crouch feels insanely out of place to me, in the same sense that if the new XCOM had crouch I'd be scratching my head. It doesn't fit the actual design of literally all the mechanics that surround it. This is especially glaring when you get into fights where there is cover all around you, but none of it is "game cover" and thus cannot be used, and obviously "crouching behind it" does nothing.
As others have noted, weapon balance is terrible, but I'll just talk about the AP aspect. I can't name them off the top of my head, but it always felt like some weapons were utterly useless based on their high AP use vs. their actual damage output. There's a lot of value in being able to use a weapon twice on a turn. Not just because you can shoot the same target twice, but that you can shoot anything twice. For example, if you have two enemies, and one is 1HP and the other is 50HP, a weapon that can only shoot once can only kill one guy or damage the other guy, leaving both guys alive. A low-AP usage weapon can kill the low-HP enemy and damage the other enemy. Not only this, but more shots down range = more chances to mitigate misses and more chances to crit. And I think that imbalance gets magnified by the fact that seemingly every weapon type has low AP and high AP usages -- and it's pretty clear the former is superior in almost all battles.
Most weapons having the same variants of AP usage is probably one of the bigger reasons for weapon imbalance. Take SMGs for example. SMGs are terrible (aside from poor damage output). SMG's don't feel like SMG's. You can't run anywhere and shoot them anymore than you could with assault rifles. If the FAMAS takes 5-AP to burst, and the PPSh takes 5-AP to burst, why would I ever use the PPSh...? Shouldn't the benefit of an SMG be its mobility, a la firing from the hip, i.e., being able to run a good distance and still use the gun? I mean, at this point you're getting into complicated shit like having mechanics that truly separate weapons from each other, but those don't exist in WL2, so all weapons exist in the exact same way - they shoot, and they sometimes burst shoot, and the only condition applied is how much AP is being used. But as it turns out AP usage for all weapons is essentially the same, which makes all weapons essentially the same. And people wonder why everyone defaults to assault rifles...? Yeesh.
I could write an essay on the AP shit, mostly tied to the fact that it falls somewhere between an actual AP design (a la JA2, X-Com), and the sudden arrival of the 2-AP system (a la XCOM), and in doing so kinda messes up a lot of the balance in general. But I'll point out smaller things that just kinda nag at me:
Crouching/standing up takes 2-AP each, as said.
However, playing Tetris with the entire party's inventory costs nothing.
You can heave a medpack fifty yards over a rock formation and have it cost nothing.
Items can be teleported to party members across multiple walls and indoor mazes for no AP cost.
Switching weapons costs no AP. I frequently ran around with the same weapon in both weapon-slots simply for the ease of use. That is, when one jammed, I'd just switch to the other. If I needed a grenade or pistol, I just equipped them out of my inventory, or out of a party member's inventory, free of charge. A weapon jam eats up two turns of action, so why not just throw this here bazooka a hundred yards and equip that instead (and not have it be skill-based to use, although other heavy weapons are) because whyyyyyyyyyy I don't fucking know. This loosey-goosey bullshit is silly as fuck, but I feel like the only one bothered by this so whatever. I will say this, it really hams up the notion that any of the characters are unique.
Really, I'd almost go so far as to suggest there shouldn't even be individual inventories aside from what equipment you're actually using, and instead have it be a party inventory with its total weight-usage based on the combined strength of the party. Literally the exact same thing it is now but with less hassle.
Also, not a balance thing, but am I the only one who thinks the 'encumbered' graphic looks like a bug from Bug's Life? I can't stop seeing little antennae and the orbs of an insect body structure.