Have only briefly tested the new version. The goblin cave and the bandit den are both still easy enough for just the main character plus your initial slave to clear out by themselves on day 1. Opening the lock for the chest at the end of the dungeon is a bit hit or miss since you won't have the thief class yet, but I was able to do it with a little save scumming some of the time. Seemed like it was about a 50% chance. My 1st slave started with apprentice so she used a wits attack to boost that stat during the first dungeon.
The goblin boss doesn't seem any harder than before to me. The bandit den boss does seem like he's got more health than he used to but was still pretty easy. I haven't tried the bandit fort yet but I suspect that may be significantly harder than before. Looking forward to trying it.
I still think initially no matter what your plan is for your eventual character development, it makes sense to initially focus on boosting wits first during combat so you can increase damage and healing capability which is very important to being able to clear out dungeons repeatedly early on. In my case I picked the acolyte class for my main character's starting class so I could heal and I gave my 1st slave apprentice for damage and the chance at opening locks.
For initial stats I still think max charisma and max sex skill makes the most sense for the main character even though it makes combat significantly harder initially. You can fix your other stats later, but doing so is now MUCH harder than it used to be since you have to upgrade every stat by 1 tier at a time. So you can't go directly from terrible to excellent for instance.
In my case I was able to upgrade my main character from terrible to average wits and magic on day 1 and my first slave from terrible physical to average on day 2. I'm playing on hard difficulty. That allowed me to pick up apprentice on my main, who is a fairy and fighter on my 1st slave who is a seraph. My stat choice on my 1st slave was a bit counterintuitive since I wanted to focus initially on wits. So even though she will eventually be focused on physical, I started her with terrible physical and excellent wits and magic.
They also seem to have given you a little bit of a boost on equipment starting out with your main starting with armor and you also start with 2 clubs in case there are no reasonable weapon options available in the shop that you can afford. So that's a nice touch for day 1.
