This isn't a complaint, at least not in the traditional sense. Don't get me wrong, I like a decent challenge, and the early game was a bit too easy to skip through before (since you're pretty much free to do what you like once you get to election). But some of the features of the new update do seem to add a pretty brutal difficulty spike that I'm wondering at, and I'm just curious as to see what other people think of it.
For starters, the limiting of the class of your starter slave by your chosen guild. From a realism standpoint, makes a bit more sense. But from a gameplay one it's a bit of a pain. Put it this way - say you're a mage (my preferred build). Odds are you'd want to join mages guild. Before now I always did, and took a more physical-oriented starter slave build. But with the class limitation from new update, now joining mages guild means you basically have to have a mage slave. Which is a bit of an issue if you're already a mage yourself, since now you've got two mages instead of a physical/magic combo. So whilst it does make sense to do it, if you want a more balanced starter team you have to join a guild which isn't oriented to your characters traits but the one you want for your slave. So you seem to end up either having to have two characters with similar build or join a guild that doesn't really suit your character. I ended up having to quickly level slave to get her a more physical-focused class. You'd think you could at least get attendant or something with an equally general use cross-guild.
Second thing I noticed was the apparent decrease to the damage done by DOTs. Bleed in particular seems to be almost worthless now. As far as I can tell, all it does is one damage per round. When your enemies are averaging a good 80-90 health, 1 a turn is getting you nowhere, even if you stack the bleeds to 2 or 3. Yeah, don't want it to point where your DOTs can nuke enemies for you, but this low seems a bit much, since they make the abilities they're attached to almost worthless. It hasn't had too much effect on my gameplay since I tend to go for raw power than DOT, but still seems a little harsh.
Final change I noticed that I found a little odd was the buffs that random enemies seem to get. I imagine further into game they provide a nice little challenge, but if you encounter them early on they can utterly waste your team. My two newbies came up against a guy with buffs giving him a damage bonus and over 200 health total in their first fight, on top of the four other mobs. Yeah, was some pure bad luck, but maybe there needs to be something to stop something that brutal occuring so early on.
As I said at start, this isn't a complaint so much as some confusion. Difficulty spiking is one thing, but these just seem to be making things painfully awkward rather than challenging. You can push on past them, sure, but honestly, they seem a bit much.
Oh, and as a side note, is anyone else finding an issue with quests like 'clear the wolves' or 'clear the goblins' not always giving you gold reward?