I've given this a try to see whether it resolved my problems with the alpha. It doesn't, though it is much improved in other ways. Caveat: all I've done so far is beat Ep1 with the first three classes, so maybe things get better later on.
My key complaint is lack of variety. Enemies feel about the same, and turns feel about the same. For context, my favorite entry in the board-game-ish roguelike genre is Hearthstone's roguelike PvE content (much of which is free--not F2P, actually free). There, the turns vary a lot: your hand changes, the board changes, you're gaining mana, etc. The bosses tend to encourage somewhat different approaches, too.
In Dicey Dungeons, there's very little difference turn to turn. Typically, you're just trying to maximize the effect of your equipment, whether that's damage, poison, block, etc., and the way you do it is the same each turn. The enemies usually just do over-complicated stuff that results in you taking damage. There are some attempts to break this tedium, like how shocked equipment forces you to decide whether to unlock it, but to me it just doesn't feel different enough.
I also feel that the turns are too brain-burning, which is weird because I like think-y games. But here, you're calculating as much as you would to pull off a cool combo turn in Hearthstone (or Dominion, for that matter), except instead off pulling off a cool combo, you're just doing a normal amount of damage. And you gotta do this every turn. It just feels like way too much calculation for what you're getting from it.
There are some other minor things that bug me:
- There are too many situations where dragging out a fight for farming purposes is optimal (like the situation singletee mentions). This is tedious, plus it doesn't make sense from a game universe perspective: why can't I use Bandage to recover health outside a fight? It's OK to have farming in corner cases, but it feels too common in this game.
- So far, gold feels a bit pointless. I haven't yet failed to have money for something I wanted to buy.
- It bugs me that you can't inspect what resistances an enemy has from the map. e.g. It sucks to enter a fight with a poison build and find out that the enemy is poison-resistant. Obviously you're eventually going to remember who is poison-resistant, so there would be no loss of strategy to tell you in-game.
- This is probably a bug, but my equipment doesn't consistently stay in the slots where I put it.