All right, I played the new patch, and here's what I can say on it:
The new dating mini-game is fairly good, much better than the previous fluff, with deck based on your main character and its selection. Not only that, but all characters relation now play a role - although only the town ones have any specific images, the change is still positive overall, and the rewards from quests are fairly solid as well, though whenever you get them in time you really want them to be is fairly random.
The healing changes were pretty much needed, because healing spells were exceptionally well-scaling with magic, and turned the entire game into heal spamming and endless tanking - now you have to use shields instead, which prevent taking damage and decay over time, which also made otherwise not very useful at all times protect/aegis spells into fairly solid defense options for tanking. Some of them actually become better, like regenerate, which is now 25% flat heal of max health, which benefits characters that have large health pools and often low magic power, that made it before fairly weak or outright useless. Though characters that just have heal and no shielding often became weaker, since if you want them to stay relevant in later game stages, you'll need to import those skills via breeding or fusion.
At same time, defending was replaced by shielding, which means a character with low magic power wont defend themselves much and you'd better spend all action points in such cases, and only characters who can "defend" are either defensive trait, chaotic random buff or guard skill(also found on shield items).
Certain level types, like support, now focus not on seduction/magic/mana, but mostly on mana capacity, which is good, because level types are supposed to focus on a attribute, and the change makes things less confusing and more practical in general.
Some professions got buffed, like quester, which now costs nothing to select, biologist, which is now cheaper, and battlemaster, which is also cheaper, but still feels worse price and power wise compared to knight/magician, let alone god.
Events are also better - the siren one now takes only 10 minutes instead of 30, and you now have the option to recover stamina, turning otherwise an event only good if you are struggling with health/mana into a pretty much good one to have, and raiders penalty harsher as a result. Now as long you keep getting those, your party can have enough stamina to complete the entire portal in a single expedition.
Elemental overhauls are much better, with double damage to those who are weak, and making team composition more important on picking the right members to counter the enemy. In fact, combat can be easier than before if you utilize it properly.
Overall strategy is pretty much almost the same - do well overall and you'll reach the end game without exceptional problems. The new changes encourage elemental usage, on top of healing rework that requires party composition change, but nothing particularly freaky. I'm still on a path towards new content, but I'll speak about it later.
