Well, the latest patch changed many things, while I am going through hard things like breakups with a certain modder in my situation, but anyway; plenty of changes that I can classify as good and bad:
Let's start with most important ones; earlier on, I said that Ascended profession would get nerfed later on due to its immense power for low cost, and many people booed me at the time, and guess what, it got nerfed, with its cost increased to 5 and giving a divine favor every 2 days instead of 1, which turned it from most powerful profession into still strong, but nowhere as before due to reduced power and less flexibility as a result of its increased cost, meaning it has fair amount of competition when it comes to choices now. Which gives me a idea - a unnerfed version of it on higher challenge ranks as a reward, if not outright even stronger one(s) at 30+ ranks(you have to play those harder challenges again since they are going to be reworked to be less boring and more harder I guess).
Difficulty sliders are changed; notably, you can set your starting money at negative, which gives a higher multiplier than previous money cap, though considering your starting money by default is 500 instead of 1000, it does have a point. As for bonus modifiers, the elemental lock is back, alongside changes on modifiers; unprepared for example gives 30% instead of 15% before, raiders only give 10% instead of 20%, harsh gives 15% instead of 5%, wild spawns a random creature instead of 2 flowers, which is harder since flowers were a manageable annoyance, while a random creature presents an extra threat that is often harder to remove, if not outright being the most dangerous enemy in battles.
The new unique character which is a glorified tutorial is fairly decent character due to your starting bonuses to compensate for lack of skill tree and unique powers that makes main characters strong, especially if you take diminished modifier that barely affects you due to lack of said skill trees. Well, still far from being a comparable choice in later stages, but for a novice it does the job, not unlike traits that give you strong units like kraken ally. Oh and other unique characters got their unique things to make them worthwhile as main characters, but in general, they still make it harder overall unless they have high base stats/growth/special abilities. As well the fact you can now select NPCs and special unique characters that the icon still says you can't select them. Oh and right, when playing them, you need to have hidden power trait alongside evolved, since compared to creator character, they gain doubled genes with hidden power trait, which means you can have 12 genes in category you want. Still doesn't make them flexible, but if they have really useful specials later on, they'll probably become viable, though strong ones like the unique guardian and other powerful picks got somewhat nerfed by making the worlds harder, alongside the fact characters with sizes above normal with expection of 1 that makes all portals enormous sized suffer when it comes to what they can enter.
Hard mode trait is now harder; instead of just increasing enemy scaling, it also increases enemy limits, which means at later stages of the game, you will see much more enemies engaging you, meaning you pretty much have to possess strong teams quicker than ever if you have it enabled. It gives more points as a result, but whenever people are able to justify its higher penalty is up to time to tell.
If you are non-creator/shapeshifter character, you can instead take shifts, which are alternative to shows that finally allows you to compete with them(especially on lower ranks, where you actually get more money, at cost of it being less time efficient), alongside new scenes that are fairly interesting, some of them having permanent effects like reducing your maximum morale, which makes ruthless trait and vampire maid pretty much a recommended choice to prevent ending up with very low morale, not unlike devil potential.
Dating is harder, due to fact you now have to manage fun, and in order to maintain fun, you pretty much have to do relax/explore actions in order to get events that allow you to recover from penalties, alongside making varied modifier in your deck much more valuable than it was before. Oh and use partners actions more frequently, as they are already fairly good compared to normal ones unless required. However, the new scenes do make up for it, meaning you are encouraged to explore/relax more alongside more rewards for doing so.
Element selection at the start no longer gives starting stat bonuses, meaning there's no reason to pick ones that boost your stats like stone for armor, but it also means the somewhat buggy scaling of percentage based boosts from first three elements are no longer in play, and shadow/light elements are no longer ones that are bad for you due to fact none have a boost anymore besides unique traits the spirits spawn with, still has no impact with unique starters modifier, which did force you to pick elements with stat boosts anyway. So only reason to pick elements is either ones that give you a elemental apprentice associated with it, or ones that give strong evolved spirits like ice/stone element.
Now for something less important but still notable;
Portal shaper is now 0 points instead of 1. It still lacks power due to fact ascended lets you have unlimited portals effectively later on, or the fact shaping portals isn't efficient unless you want to turn it into a farming island or a safe heaven, but hey, a buff is a buff.
Endurance trait now also doubles your starting stamina in addition to doubling your cap, which makes it worthwhile for extra stamina alone at the start, normally you would only take it with ascended due to fact you can recover more stamina with higher cap or with easy modifier that makes reaching normal cap much faster, but now it is a good must have in many situations.
Desert biomes are still fairly rare to encounter, but at very least not as very rare as before.
Well, that was plenty of changes, like while bugs such as poison sting being bugged if it hits the maps edge from target resulting in nothing taking damage and spending mana/action for nothing, alongside a bug that happens if you seduce a target which then dies next turn but you skip the turn before the animation finishes, resulting in a frozen battle. But, I can say that unnerfed variants of previously broken things could be implemented as rewards for harder games or something.