Originally posted by Midnight Crumpet:

How come?

The update was generally pretty underwhelming.

Shifting defensive stats away from stamina as well as making most stamina foods both tedious to farm & less optimal for their heavy penalty to health compared to alternatives hasn't been entirely great. Streamlining food so that we basically only eat meat is nice for the simplicity, but there's little reason to use anything else; alternatives are weak and more difficult to acquire. Also, mead is even more powerful than before with the tweaks to health & stamina, so have fun filling your inventory with healing & stamina meads as well as biome specific ones as well, clogging up space and adding extra carry weight.

New changes to player stagger makes fighting fast hitting enemies, hard hitting enemies, or groups of enemies less fun and more tedious, especially when trying to do corpse runs. Parry builds in particular suffer because of the stagger changes. Fighting groups of enemies in general has become much more difficult because taking a hit or even parrying often staggers you. Bows are now even more viable just because you can't as reliably hold your ground against groups, and nearly every enemy spawns in groups.

Weapon changes were pretty much universally a miss. Though mostly inconsequential, the battleaxe was pushed in the direction of the Atgeir's role but just does it worse, and the bow feels clunky and lethargic despite still being the most powerful option.

Tar enemies combine some of the most annoying mechanics including projectile spam, high damage, high spawns, and slowdowns. Similarly, gathering tar sucks.

Most of the content additions were pretty cool, but the tweaks and reworks were largely just annoying.