Welp, after about 12 solid hours of purging....
It's great.
They fixed or touched on most of the things in the last Beta that had me concerned.
-Your strike team members show up in your own lobby.
-You can dodge with guns now, they just kinda have crappy dodge compared to melee weapons.
-It's a little easier to compare weapons to each other now.
-Relatively few crashes or disconnects all said and done.
-Good weapon testing ground now.
-Better looking UI in a lot of places.
-Some but not all basic settings added in.
-Some of the in-game cutscenes are cleaned up.
And there's more content now like Okri's Challenge-style achievements with cosmetic rewards at the end of them, somewhat more cosmetics, more weapons, a few new missions types. Cutscenes roughly every few major levels to clue you in to some new thing you unlocked. There's a currently busted/unfinished barber for your changing your appearance.
Overall the game feels a bit harder. We spent a lot of hours at Rank 1 difficulty. It wasn't overly hard but it was still engaging. There's no shortage of enemies at that difficulty so you get to do plenty of killin. And you can get in trouble if you fall asleep at the wheel. But there's a lot of things that don't show up that that difficulty like secondary objectives and some enemies.
But Rank 2 is noticeably harder while not worth a ton more coin and xp than Rank 1. Rank 3 is a pretty big jump up from Rank 2 in pretty much all areas.
We did get through some Rank 3 missions tonight. I've hit Trust Level 15 and I think the game's difficulty is pretty heavily dependent on the power rating of your weapons versus the difficulty level you're attempting and not much else. Unfortunately they don't do a good job of explaining what your overall power level is like in VT2, and what that affects. It seemingly is like VT2, in that the three extra charm/trinket/what have you slots carry a power level, implying it contributes to some overall pool.
Progression seems kinda slow. Because what weapons you can buy easily only change about every 45 minutes, progression kind of lurches along in fits and spurts. Especially if you're sticking with a weapon you like. DT is perhaps a little stingy with gear. There's no crafting system that I've seen so far, so weapons you don't use you just recycle into money to buy more weapons with.
One somewhat annoying thing they still haven't fixed though is various settings literally getting changed mid with the player not doing it themselves. Mouse-sensitivity, input settings, HUD settings, they just change mid game. I noticed it with my HUD scaling because the HUD would start getting all buggy with where it was displaying stuff, often pushing my lifebar off the screen. If I pop into options and change even 1% scaling, it snaps back to true.
All in all I'm enjoying the hell out of it. It's a very satisfying "Tide" experience. Looking forward to more stuff getting added to the beta in the next few weeks.