So, to start off, battle sprites:

~They add more variety to play this game in a funner style that everyone can customize, in combination with the upcoming difficulty choices, and the shield and dash features, I see no cons from this as a 2 year player. This does relight my experience in spiral knights, and I highly anticipate the new update coming up. Now if difficulty and now new levels weren't the case I'd call these ideas overpowered as a fully experienced player can solo anything easily, difficulty sliders I hope are promising to this experience, otherwise these new battle skills and elements are just a stylish way to kill everything within a minute or two.

Next off is our new changes to party/mission specific elements:

~Such as client side exclusive loots and drops.. different for each party member, while this is nice for those who want to be greedy or "fair" with pills and such, this does have a downside of forcing other players to assure they scavenge the entire level to assure they didn't miss any of their own things that dropped and it ruins the spirit of sharing things which is what a real team should be able to do, as it can help collaboration in other players, the client side drop idea is good for collaboration as well but it doesn't being the team closer together or give that fun trust or good feeling of sharing resources to other players. Honestly, I'm neutral on the player side drop changes.

~Reviving system, is changed up as of the new update coming up, now, while I myself prefer to have the health share reviving for personal friends, this is a nifty idea for players to conserve their health without cooking up an excuse on why they don't want to revive anyone, such as people you carry in shadow lairs or some other high difficulty considered depth, this is helpful to collaboration in some ways, as players who beg to be revived are absolutely obnoxious about it and it makes me prefer going solo on my own runs because of this, however that's just a personal preference, and rather doesn't reflect the idea of reviving in teams or not, same goes for heat sharing from health revives but eventually you get all the heat you need anyway so that's not a major factor in terms of the game's intended use of reviving.

~Equipment limits I agree with for the most part, this is good for newer players with big wallets, as some of them statistically tend to skip the missions and get their full 5 star gear, and accessorize. After that it ruins their experience on SK and they wouldn't stay very long after that simple enough. It feels good to earn the ability to do anything new, getting maxed out asap is not the idea, it's working for it and feeling good after each thing achieved, working hard is the fun of the game, as well as team-play and social interaction.

Miscellaneous changes:

~Orbs of alchemy and Sparks of life... interesting, the (new) sparks of life remind me of the revive tokens in the mobile game "Sonic Dash" This certainly seems like some new scheme in my head, however it could just be to accommodate the reviving system and looking deeper into it.. you would be prepared for a hard run or danger mission if you had sparks of life stockpiled but less than 100 energy at hand. While this is nice, I can hope that these sorts of revive tokens don't affect the prices of reviving negatively. The orbs of alchemy I think are strange to add in a game where energy is the main resource of most things, but as with the sparks of life, I hope the costs to get these robs of alchemy are the same as the equivalent energy to craft gear, I can't find much pros about this as it seems useless to add the orbs other than the idea of realism, where orbs of alchemy are made with energy crystals and can be used to fuse together certain materials to create a new kind of piece of gear, although that is convincing enough to see why they are added in the game, but still strike me suspicious on pricing and the now questionable purpose of energy as its used to purchase things from the supply depot, to me it seems like energy is a premium kind of currency that is universal among the markets but its name and old use don't add up to this purpose, I'll say no more about this, however.

These are my thoughts on the good and the bad of the upcoming changes, however I focused on points I thought affected the game most, and may not have covered everything.

Edit: Please keep discussion about items on the preview server in the testing forum feedback thread. Thank you!