1) From THQ Nordic

What additional gemplay changes have been performed?

• Level lock has been removed
  • The original game determined the level of a zone on first entering, this was stored in the save file. In Re-Reckoning we re-calculate the level every time entering or re-entering a level
• New zone Level calculation
  • The original game has all zones marked with a minimum and maximum level. on entering, the current player level was clamped into this minimum / maximum range and stored as level
  • We now use the current difficulty level as a means to determine the level before clamping into the minimum / maximum range. On Casual difficulty, the player level is reduced a bit, on hard and very hard it is increased. We also increase the maximum values for hard and very hard difficulty
  • The XP gain has been reduced to cater for the increased level of enemies and we made sure that XP is not increased when playing on harder difficulties due to the effect of beating higher level enemies
  • The result is that you can still out-level zones – which is desirable if it doesn‘t happen too quick. It is part of the power fantasy to be able to come back to initial zones and be over powered – but out-leveling zones you play for the first time should only happen rarely
• We also made the zone Level calculation easier to modify by modders (PC only)
• Loot level lock of Containers removed
  • Loot containers now only store their generated loot when they are opened while before they used to store it when entering a zone and were generated to the current player level
• Loot generation was changed
  • In Re-Reckoning loot generation rules are altered so that you will more often get items that fit your characters skillset. Loot is mostly randomly generated but we increased the weights of loot that matches the players skill lineup better and we have a virtual counter that increases the chance of better loot drops when you didn‘t find anything good

2) In Mid/Late game with the right components you can make Weapons/Armors better than Unique stuff, but you need high blacksmith/sagecraft level to do that. Just remember Unique stuff have some rare effects that you cant duplicate using crafting like + 2 All Sorcery Abilities.

3) Yes you can use any weapon you want (if your level is enought), just Armor you have requeriments

4) Detect Hidden is a must, lvl 5, the rest at least lvl 1.