thoroughly enjoyed elites last night... adds much more variety to the playing field and enjoying the new challenges.
and the changes to the upgrade mechanics have a nice feel to them, less investment same potential for customization. for me it massively reduces any potential for grind (that i never actually felt, but others seem to) because on death i almost always have enough stones to bring a character back up to a sufficient number of upgrades to be very playable even on a hard difficulty (and this is just by popping into buildings i pass along the way to check out easy to reach stashes).
very good - however, having read a number of threads on here talking about the need for grinding upgrade stones and enchant containers, and a number of others talking about avoiding enemies and not killing to avoid unlocking stronger monsters (i can't really understand this - i'm with terraziel again, challenging is a good attribute for a video game) it seems it might make sense to have elites and more powerful (later unlocked) monsters drop one upgrade stone or enchant charge on death? would nicely increase the motivation for engaging with the enemy and at the same time give further incentive to killing the lesser bad guys to unlock the harder ones which release you from the early game mechanic of specifically searching for upgrade and enchant containers? i don't know, just a thought ... might be a step too far - i don't feel the grind at all (for either of the above mentioned items) but if some do???