Hellgate:London

[Lissa]

In situations where you're facing large mobs of ranged attackers, you can use a grappler (on a wepaon switch) to pull them in one by one and destroy them with a sword equipped in the other hand. I didn't like this much in the beta, but have found it to work pretty well. Mostly you need it for the orbile types, which tend to float around out of melee range, but it can be useful against other rnaged attackers too. I haven't found the sword throwing or "heavens arc" skills to attack flying demons to be much use though, I must say.

Well, the problem is most glaring in the dry river bed areas in Act 3. The problems that occur is if you get an unlucky grouping of two out of three mobs for that area as ranged, you're going to be in for a world of hurt using a grappler or charging as the AI tends to clump up these mobs together. And like I noted, the auras that help you with ranged attacks will be of little good here as there will typically be too many incoming ranged attacks to make the auras really effective.

As to Heaven's Arc, I found that it is useful in most situations where it was only not useful in a couple places (dealing with an Orbile boss in Act 5 prior to get to St. Pauls and the Orbile in the hellgate itself). Outside of those two instances, Heaven's Arc was plenty useful with only a single point placed in it. As to throwing your sword, that's pretty much a useless skill. Too long a cooldown for too little damage, even if you go all the way to the bottom of the tree.

Yup --- high stun defense is a must for Templars, as is good ignite defense, but that's just a matter of equipping yourself properly, which is not hard to do. (One way they buffed templars was to increase resistances to special effects on all templar armors; the first blademaster I played in the alpha spent almost the entire time getting stunned and ignited, and spent all the money he collected on health injectors and other potions). Also, you can keep gyro-stabalizers and fire retardents on your belt to remove those effects if you happen to get hit by them.

True, but you already have a limited enough inventory and most of the time you can get through the ignites without much issue. I've found that stun and poison were the two biggest defenses you needed with stun being the top one in need.

Using different types of damage -- with corresponding sfx's -- to attack to best advantage, and defending yourself against those sfx's procing (and especially stacking) is IMO an interesting and vital part of the combat system. (Quick summary for anyone who hasn't tried the game: physical=stun; fire=ignite and lose 5% health/sec: nasty if it happens to you and good if you ignite a boss with lots of life; poison=no heal: so you have to pay attention and take an antivenom before a health injector if you're also being beat on by high da demons when you're poisoned; lightning=shock: can't use skills, which also cuts both ways).
I found skills work pretty well even with not so many skill points invested, and they automatically improve with your character lvl, so you don't need to keep adding points to maintain their effectiveness. Also, dual-wielding splash damage swords gives blademasters a pretty powerful melee-aoe attack that works well against packs.

Yep, I was lucky and found several very good splash damage weapons as I was going through the game, but that still was no substitute for using Sweeping Strikes and Sword of Justice for packs. Combining splash damage without those AoE attacks just made situations more quick to deal with.

I didn't like the surges either, and the health one especially seemed fairly ineffective. But I may be biased --- I don't like that kind of skill anyway: it reminds me of the "charge-up-and-release" type of attack that is too much micro-managing for my tastes.

Surges are just plain bad.

I've no idea what any of the character builds will look like by the time you get to 50, but I really doubt that it will work that way, unless it's by choice. Just my experience, but I've never really encountered problems running out of power (in part, for templars, because the normal attacks work very well on their own, which I sort of like, so you don't have to use your skills non-stop. Some points in matched blades is essential, but it may just mean you have to decide eventually how yo balance your stat point distribution into willpower and your skill point distribution into matched blades. It is a different thing that your stat point distribution is basically determined by the stat-cost of the items you want to equip, but I actually sort of like that too. So far, I've found adding stat points for my items (strating around lvl 10, which is when the stat-costs of your items start to exceed your beginning stats) and skill points here and there according to their appeal has worked fine. Maybe I'll discover that I'm thouroughly gimped at lvl 50, but I'd be surpried.
That is for sure, and it's not a good thing (even if they put a stopgap "/stuck" command into the game to work around this).

From what I've been able to determine on builds with the Blademaster, you either go down the Sword of Authority track or you got down the Multi-strikes track.

The game was definitely released with way too many bugs and annoyances, but I'm not so sure about the balance issues.
I really like the caster classes. They're strong but I don't think they're unbalanced, or that the blademaster is worse off. A blademaster with good swords can end up doing more damagae than a similar lvl evoker, and a marksman can do a ton of damage from range but is really fragile when compared with a guardian.

Anyway, these comments aren't intended to be argumentative, just some thoughts about the game in response to what you found.:)

I wouldn't call it imbalanced between the characters, it's more imbalanced between the mobs and how they work against the various classes in the various terrains. There are some mobs and some terrains that are just horrible for the Templar to deal with while there are some mobs with some terrain that is just horrible for the Cabalists to deal with and likewise the Hunters, but it seems that the Templar have the biggest problems due to a combination of mobs with terrain and bugs with the terrain itself (getting stuck) that really causes the issues.