I had a problem with Arch-based (or systemd based?) distros with my Acer ES1-512 laptop. Every time I used systemctl suspend or pm-suspend the whole system just totally froze. Shutdown didn’t work either: the system was shut down, but the laptop didn’t turn off (screen backlight was on, and the fans were working too). I tried a bunch of kernels, systemd versions, different kernel parameters, but neither of them worked.
A week ago I installed Arch again and played around with the BIOS settings (again). Then I’ve found the source of the problem, or at least I think: I had to disable the xHCI support (External USB 3.0 controller) in the BIOS settings. After I disabled it, the freezes were stopped, my Acer laptop started to work properly. Shutdown works too.
I answered a question about this in the Arch Linux forums too: Acer Aspire E13 : Suspend/Poweroff don’t Work
UPDATE: The problem exists with Debian 8 “Jessie” too, so it seems it’s not Arch-specific, rather systemd-specific, I think. The solution should work with Debian (or with other systemd based distros) too.