What people consider fun differs from person to person so I cannot really adjust on that alone as a point for adjusting abilities/gear etc. Some like exploding entire screens at once, other want the challenge of slow combat.
Fact is, GD classes have not been touched at all, so they do no compare to RoT classes, as mentioned multiple times already. So if you want a fast paced game, don’t pick dual GD. I do plan to adjust those classes in a future patch so that everything is (more or less) viable again.
I’ve quickly tried a firestrike demolitionist+sorceress (endgame only) with a strong bow + hydra’s and was able to kill some ubers in about 2 minute fights. Which seems long, but I recall some GD fights against the stronger celestials taking much much longer. Someone else tried an endgame 2x GD build and did pretty ok (GDstashed just to check endgame options). But thats just a quick reference.
In terms of balancing. Prior to this patch, anyone would one-shot his way through the content, regardless of your stats/gear/skills used, until you hit the ubers and then suddenly realize 800 OA/AR isn’t enough for end-game stuff (a lot of people bought this just for the RoT mod and have 0 experience with GD mechanics). As now the campaign has increased quite a bit in terms of difficulty, it also clearly shows which skills are way to weak, and which ones still perform well. Something that wasnt really noticeable before. So I’ve buffed a lot of skills to be up-to-snuff for the new campaign with coming patch. Things like lightning, fissure, volcano, double throw etc. Because of the coming skill changes (some skills will function differently as well) I hope to have fixed many of these issues that forces you to level in a certain (few) ways till you find your required item. Respeccing is free and easy to do so I don’t see much of an issue with that.
A quick example. As it’s easy to max a skill, lets say Lightning, after you’ve maxed it there is no way to properly increase it’s damage anymore. This applies to a lot of skills. Diablo 2 had it’s synergy system to fix this, which doesn’t work here unless it’s a direct modifier. So an example for next patch: I’ve simply made chain lightning the secondary effect of lightning. This requires more point investment, through which you can increase your skill damage for much longer than if it would be the single 20-point skill you have maxed already at lvl15 and as a result, ends up as a smoother leveling experience.
Yup, and this is sort of intended. It’s supposed to be a challenge. You should pay attention to your stats, also while leveling. Currently is slightly too difficult though as the defense of monsters is too high (as mentioned many times by now), so you have to focus a lot on attack rating and as a result deal no damage, either you miss everything or you have no damage stats as everything is aimed at buffing AR (exaggerated this a bit, but it’s kinda what happens).
Early game runewords do pretty well, else target farming is just like it works in Diablo 2 (and pretty much any other looter-ARPG). If you are looking for an item you go kill monsters in the area where the monster/item level is. While leveling you can only specifically target farm the new MI’s, which are quite a lot better than uniques of their itemlevel, even if you get non-beneficial affixes. In this case, Stone of Jordan is target farmed by simply running travincal+mephisto on normal. Most people find one or two of those rings within 1 hour. (Sounds long, but how many hours did people spend on finding one at the original D2?).