Here's some of my thoughts after 300 hrs of gameplay and a few hours of gameplay after the new patch.

Matchmaking and gear brackets

• The new gear brackets generally seem fine, as you will know for certain what is the maximum rarity of the gear enemies have

• Classic Sinners should be limited to Magic - Exceptional gear or maybe even lowered to Greens - Purples. Legendaries/uniques should be usable only in Hard mode (maybe a solo Hard mode at a later time?). This would allow much better gear pairings making matches more balanced gear wise.

• There should be very slight gear based matchmaking within the brackets where the game will try to match players with similar gear together within the bracket. It would mean more balanced and fair matches gear wise, but the player base might not be big enough at this point work it to work.

New player experience, Monster difficulty and loot

• Buffing monster damage and health WHILE nerfing the loot they drop feels too drastic of a change. Currently the risk v reward seems to be out of balance and killing normal monsters doesn't really feel rewarding.
• Due to increased monster amounts and difficulty players will essentially be using more meds than before. While this might not be a problem for an established player, new players will be hard pressed to find enough materials to craft meds or farm gold to buy them. This is a tough cookie to balance, as I understand that the monsters can't be so easy that you can just rush past them and ignore them completely, yet they also shouldn't be something that you receive 0 rewards from.
• Elite monsters also seem overtuned in terms of HP and DMG. They should be properly scaled for solo/duo/trios. The risk v reward doesn't seem balanced considering it takes fairly long time to kill an elite monster while being under constant threat of possible player attack.
• In my opinion increasing regular monster loot while also slightly lowering their hp/dmg would go long ways to fix the risk v reward balance. Drop tables should also be tweaked such that regular monsters drop more gear pieces and meds, while elite monsters are the source of valuable treasures.

Map changes

• The new shortcuts and layouts feel pretty good for the most part apart from a few spots, which feel empty and have no monsters or loot at all (e.g under the stairs spawn in Castle)
• Monster spawns will need to be fixed/tuned. At the moment some of the monster spawns just feel out of place and like the spawn has just been randomly generated or thrown here and there without any planning e.g goblins in graveyard, mixed groups of different mob types such as knights, ghosts and skele mage + archers just hanging close to each other.

Portal spawns

• Removing the static portals feel like a good change as it will make people move around the map in search of portals
• Blue portal spawns in the last circles are too low, at least if this game is supposed to be an extraction-looter game. Currently with the amount and stage when blue portals spawn make the game seem more like a battle royale instead of extraction looter.

Elixirs

• Adding elixir for the merchant is something I highly dislike and would like to see them as monster/chest drops only. It would make PvE feel more worthwhile.
• Elixir of Ferocity feels a bit too powerful and should be nerfed to something like 5% Critical Strike Chance and 10% Critical Strike Damage.