First about the alternative Leveling route:
The point of having an alternative leveling route is to prevent players from feeling bored and burned out after doing the campaign for the 500th time. Its supposed to provide a quick alternative. The current path fails right out of the gate with the lightless arbor as it is completely overtuned. And before people tell me that “its only for overgeared alts”, no it isnt. Its job is to save us time. We did the campaign, its okay to let us get to the interesting part quicker on the second to fifth run without punishing us for doing so. The lightless arbor in its current state is a complete nightmare for a level 20 character. Not only was I not enjoying it, it made me want to log out. The mobs are completely overtuned, the effective radius in which you deal full damage is way to small and the Boss requires sustain a low level character simply doesnt have. And all that doesnt even begin to describe my disappointment as I learn that this alternative leveling path forces you to go back to do sidemissions for passives and idol slots which defeats the ENTIRE purpose.
Needless to say that I think this part of the game needs a LOT of work to be not only functional but even remotely enjoyable.
Onto resource management:
Yes, we are going to talk about mana. I get it, you dont want people to trivialize resource management. And during the campaign aswell as early endgame I would somewhat agree. But with heavy investment you should be able to get to a point where mana simply doesnt matter anymore. This is a grind game. Juggling resources stops being fun after a while when youre just mindlessly farming monoliths. The amount of hoops that you have to jump through to get a channeling skill to work properly is unjustified given that they arent even stronger than other skills. I played ghostflame as my first build of the cycle and was shoehorned into a very specific kit to even be able to “kinda” fix mana, by triggering different spells that had a low chance of giving me mana back which was only possible in one specific niche of ghostflame and even then it is only really functional as a main ability against regular mobs. Bosses without adds? Nope. Youre gonna run out of mana. Same goes for warpath. There is no good reason to do this and AGAIN, Im not asking for easy manafixing at level 50, Im talking about heavy investment through passives and gear to get the build online but it shouldnt be nearly as limiting and punishing to want to play a proper channeling build. And dont get me started on traversal skills and cooldowns. If were not supposed to reach 0s cd then at least provide skill nodes that remove the cooldown in exchange for a hefty downside to enable niche builds that focus on such skills.
In closing: This game gets a lot of things right. It does many things better than its competitors and Im thankful for the effort that went into it. But many ideas like the alt leveling path are half baked and not properly implemented which makes it seem like it wasnt tested properly if at all. Also limiting build variety to such a degree is ultimately hurting the game more than it is keeping it balanced. Additional sources of mana gain outside of %regen are the bare minimum here.