I'm not too far in yet; I've unlocked like...seven classes.
The pacing...feels slow. In the original, you beat a dungeon, you unlock a class. Here, it's more like once every two dungeons, or once every three dungeons. (Notably, there's 3x easy dungeons with goat bosses, and each goat horn has diminishing returns when sold). And...once I did start unlocking level 2 classes, the Eastern Jungle, Southern Swamp, Western Tundra, and Northern Desert open up--all of which have a mission involving level 1 classes, so I feel obligated to use the level 1 classes again instead of the shiny level 2 class I just unlocked.
Speaking of those four dungeons, I've only played Northern Desert so far, but...at a glance, I suspect it's 120% stat enemies, and it feels like it might have fewer enemies than normal. I don't know if this is meant to be a challenge dungeon, but it feels...harder than expected given what I have unlocked. A lot of the murder-bait enemies like Bandits and Goats weren't unlocked for me, and some harder to kill enemies are mixed into that dungeon (trolls) so the "low stat" enemy I killed to level up were like...120% stats Goblins. The power runes weren't unlocked (poison, healing, cydstepp, and to some degree bludtopowa). There weren't really shops on the map (well...there was one, with a plot item). I mean, I was able to win by starting on the boss at level 6 and using a mid-battle-level-up, but something tells me this dungeon might be harder than intended given that it seems to assume just tier 1 classes unlocked? (For comparison purposes, I'd peg it as probably around Freeware Boss Hive difficulty?)
Now, if you discussed amongst yourselves and decided that Desktop Dungeons was just way too easy, then more power to you; ignore the above paragraph. Alternatively, maybe my town management skills suck, and I should enter the dungeon with great preparations. Just thought I'd make a note of it.
Hm, something else I've noticed about how I play...in the Freeware, when I first played, I looked at what the races did, and then stuck to Human for the first 40 or so games. (Eventually I branched out, of course). But I'm...really falling back into that old "Human every time" pattern this time given that I have to buy the race unlocks, and given that there's other stuff I'm more excited about unlocking (like classes). This might just be a playstyle thing, granted (anyone else find themselves ignoring the class unlocks in favour of other upgrades?) One other note on the races: before upgrading to get the race, it doesn't actually tell you what the race does; it's a mystery to new players! Compare this to classes, where even with a level 1 guild I can mouse-over the greyed-out Warlord and see what the class does. Are the race windows going to have preview information eventually?