Kind of, but not really. I'm finding it's a lot better to spread the points around in manually activated skills, while focusing on maxing one or two at a time. For the Engineer it actually gets a little tricky cause there are about 6 passive skills for melee I'm trying to juggle while also trying to keep some of the skills up to date. For the most part though, they all start off powerful enough initially and grow slowly enough that it's not a big deal to not bother putting points into them until you've got your primary skills up to their current max.
The rest of the gameplay is just... so much better. It really makes Torchlight 1 look like a beta in comparison. I'd recommend starting on Veteran difficulty though. Normal is still piss easy.
Actually, I do have one big complaint, and that is how they implemented respecing. All you can do is buy back your last 3 skill points. It's the most half assed implementation they could possibly muster. It's not as bad as the beta, where you could get all of them back, but you permanently lost skill points every time you did it, but it's still shitty. I've seen the interviews and such that they explain why they didn't want to include respecing at all, and I realize it'll be modded in rather quickly, but this just feels fucking lazy and spiteful.
