Having played the PTS for a little bit and explored how I personally build my characters, I thought I would give some feedback.

Overall, I like the way things appear to be moving. The first thing I took out of the current build is that you really need to think on your build in order to get something that is going to work. No longer can someone just pile everything in to one stat and ignore others and expect to be "good". You cant just pile stats in to Firearms, Stamina or Electronics and expect to do everything.

I run D3-FNC on one character and on first logging in to the PTS my reaction was this is garbage. My shield was dropping faster than a pair of knickers on prom night. So I went back to the drawing board. Instead of stacking health and stamina whilst ignoring electronics and taking a minor amount of firearms, I actually thought about what I was doing. My firearms stayed the same but I took just a little bit more skill power. Guess what happened. At 140k ish skill power I was back face tanking stuff with my shield again. I was still mowing down the enemy in PVE and not taking massive damage. Granted, if I messed up and wasn't paying attention, I would get flanked and go splat, but thats a L2P issue on my part so yeah.

I also run a Firecrest build which I will be changing to a Reclaimer build when 1.6 goes live. I like the idea of it and when I play in a group I think its gonna be immensely useful. With this i decided to experiment and stack everything towards increasing my power for that. I ended up with 350k skillpower at over 9k electronics with 35% skill haste. This was running 4 piece Reclaimer with Barrets chest and Responsive backpack. My heals were crazy and the cooldowns were just the same. 5 seconds for my heal box to cool down is great. But there are negatives. I had no health and would go down if someone were even to breath in my direction. I had booster shot but when I played in a group it was never used to help someone else. It was always on CD because I needed it solely to keep myself up. My damage rolls were terrible because i had nothing in firearms.

To counter my terrible damage I used Historian. Eben with the apparently OP'ness of it, it actually has lower damage per shot than i would get on live with my current set up (SRS A1 with 3900 FA). Do I think its OP? No. If its nerfed, is there something better I could use? Yes. Could it be changed? Yes (A PVP modifier maybe or make the explosion mitigated by something).

TL/DR

I like the way things sit with armor and Damage
Builds need thinking through (You can't stack one Main Stat and expect to be good/useful)
Historian is not OP but some changes could be made to make it less annoying in PvP
Build Diversity now exists and I love it (I can be creative and experiment)

To end, if you did read all of this, I thank you very muchly. (I waffle, I know. Its a flaw )