After listening to the campfire discussion, it occurred to me that the developers might not fully understand what some are complaining about.
The first thing I would say is it isn’t an overall lack of resource regeneration that bothers people. We get higher regeneration rates as we level, spend talent points, and get gear that has bonuses. However, the balance between the resource cost of certain abilities, combined with how little resource is recovered through generators, things seem off. We run out far quicker than we should, then it takes longer to recover than we spent using it.
The second issue is gear dependency. There are more stats in this version of the game than before, so we’ve had to prioritize. Sadly, things like crit chance, damage, attack speed, and so forth, are pushing resource generation off the list of viable choices, resulting in some classes/builds feeling resource starved, especially when using an ability that consumes all your resources at once. At least, for those who choose to use a generator and not build without one. And, there are plenty of builds like that.
In my opinion, and responders are free to debate, the solution here is to either make generators award more resources, make spenders cost less, or a little both to find a proper balance. We also shouldn’t have to rely on an unrelated skill to regenerate resources either. Using the Necromancer as an example, casting Raise Skeleton after all have been summoned, restores some of your essence. It feels strange pressing that to get essence back faster than I would with something like Decompose or Hemorrhage. Our generators should always be our primary means for refilling our resources, with smaller possible refunds as options on other skills.
As things are, generators as so lack luster, most people only put the two required point into one before moving on. That in itself is a big indicator that something is wrong with them. However, if your intention is that everybody spec out of them once they get another means of filling their orb, then at least put an interesting passive in the first tier to move those point to. Or, remove the two point requirement from the first tier so we can put those points elsewhere.
Please, feel free to discuss, debate, and add your own thoughts. But please, keep it civil. This is an open discussion, and I want it to be constructive, not a chance to take shots at people for their ideas, good or bad.