More weapons are usable from an earlier stage due to a more standardized stat requirement approach
Did you find this to negatively effect the balance a bit? Or desirable lack of balance that PB games often provide, rather? Does it make early-mid game much too easy?
I don't think it affected balance so much as it made me try out more weapons from the very beginning since you can basically access every single weapon tree with relatively modest stats (easily augmented with amulets + rings for a bit of stats here and there). At no point did I have _more_ damage, just more guns to use. What it did do however is lead me to use laser rifles a lot more since I usually don't bother with them until mid-to-late game.
So, what I mean is that before the warbow even at +0 had higher stat requirements but also did higher damage. Now the warbow actually does
less damage than a hunter's bow. Each individual upgrade to each weapon is a much larger jump per "upgrade" and the differences are now in how they affect the skills and "overall characteristics" -- the way it's intended is that the hunter bow is a "strong and accurate sniper weapon" where-as the warbow is now primarily intended to use with scatter shot (it now shoots more arrows).
It's easier to explain using laser rifles. So the laser blasters have slightly lower damage, slightly lower stat requirements, higher magazine capacity, and have a higher rate of fire (across all modes). The laser rifle on the other hand which is slighter stronger and has slightly higher stat requirements has a smaller magazine and the delay between each shot is about 3x what the laser blasters' ROF is. Basically one is a "slow rate of fire more accurate/stronger automatic rifle" and the other is a "rapid fire low accuracy SMG with weaker individual shots."
Take a look at this image, and see how each "tree" starts at very similar stats at +0, but differentiate as they upgrade, and that their accuracy and cooldown are quite different from one another. Basically, each tree has an intended use and isn't just a +1 version of another.
The shotguns are also different -- with the double-barrel tree being about 25% stronger in damage but has a longer cooldown between shots (and only 2 shells can be loaded at once) where-as the scrap shotgun tree is more like a semi-automatic rifle with lower damage but higher ROF.
Melee weapons are basically similar to how they were before except their hidden attributes were changed. Those are things like how much "stagger" damage they do and the range of min/max damage. They don't have the drastic differences in "intended use" as the ranged weapons do.
The biggest change in how weapons
perform is the projectile launcher, which now shoots like 10 rounds a second and is very much a heavy machine-gun/auto-cannon style weapon; very satisfying when blasting down stronger individual enemies like a Patron or Cyclops.
The biggest change in
weapon stats are the unique weapons which are now all basically the highest/strongest version in their respective trees, and each is given to a specific tree. I did like this change a lot since I thought it was really silly how a generic upgraded weapon was often better than a famed weapon...
but it does mean that you are better off not upgrading a generic all the way and just getting the famed weapon -- though their stat requirements are often much, much, much higher and you get into the "must spend 5 stat points just to raise the stat by 1" territory for that, requiring you to really plan your levels (or chug a metric ton of elex potions).
EDIT: Typos.
