Right then. My thoughts on a few subjects:

First of all, First Aid. In the last game it seemed kinda underpowered. There were pretty much no times to use it on NPCs, demonic skitty aside, it's main use seems to be on allies. But since it only cures HP and not Sanity, and both HP and Sanity are cured by resting, it kinda felt redundant. Like I was at a disadvantage for picking it. And if you introduce money as another way of healing, then it will be even worse.

Second, Tashy. After she was interviewed, it kinda felt like the emisarries were taking a back seat, like it doesn't matter if we don't find the stalkers, cause after a set time has passed we win anyway. It was just, oh look, and item for this NPC to use to win for us, unlike previous games where the ritual needed to be discovered and decoded by the players. Tashy felt like those times a DM has a PC and railroads them into being the main character, wiith the players just kinda along to watch how awesome they are.
Aside from that, the only hint at how important she was was that she was a returning character, which locked out anyone who didn't know the significance of a past stalker now being an NPC. If no-one from the first game had been playing, then Tashy could have easily gone unoticed for the whole game. It just seems kinda biased towards older players, like, you're new to this so you can't help with the big discoveries.
So if you were to have Mercs, then maybe make them slightly weaker that players, or having sills the players can't use, so they add to the group instead of taking the place of an emmisary. For instance, instead of just the same interview that an emmisary would get, them could have something like an stealth skill to overhear what others are saying without interviewing them, getting different info than the players would, making them an addition instead of a replacement.

Third, Mission disclosure. It going up when you lose all your sanity is fine, it's a reason not to just go in gung ho and gives a consequence to running out of sanity. But having it go up from interviewing as well discorages players from talking to NPCs, especially if they don't have a perfect type matchup. Since this isn't a hardcore competative MOBA, the players most likely won't have a perfect type combination to get a good rapport with every NPC. But if you don't have one, then it's rarely worth interviewing anyone, as if you hit a stalker, you'll get a penalty. So in the end everyone stays inside for fear of raising mission disclosure by talking to the wrong pokemon, and I kinda felt like this missed the point of the game.

Other than those points, everything was great. It lasted the right amount of time, and up until Tashy blasted everything into dust it felt like we were making real progress with the stalkers.
So yeah, just thought I'd put these out there.