There seems to be a lot of changes. For one, the new material system reworked what's good for what a little. Making adamantium warhammers is much less effective than before; platinum or gold or some other heavy metal seems to work much better. Also, type of damage and armor type versus different kinds of damage seems to play a larger role than before. I tried scientifically testing as best I could manage the impact of blunt on plate versus blunt on leather and other armors. I couldn't show you conclusive values, but I was appealed with the idea that between two hits that both connect, flexible armors "softened" the blows better with less internal damage- more bruising than bone breaking.
Getting ANY armor on your dwarves right now dramatically helps them. Any cheap material covering your dwarves plenty of mail can make those previously annoyingly deadly cheap copper goblin bolts suddenly useless.
In addition, there seem to be significantly longer lived beatings- or just less instant mortal wounds. It's a bit deceptive, you can deliver a mortal wound of some kind early in the fight, but have to wait for the wound to cause the poor guy to bleed out or suffocate. This happened before, but it's a lot more noticeable now. You can crush their throat, and then still have time to break every bone in their body before they suffocate- all probably the combination of smaller changes. The only instant-deaths seem to need turning the brain into something.... less than functional. Blunt hits to the head damaging the brain, piercing the head, removing the head, etc. Things like destroying the upper spine aren't instant death so much anymore, but rather just complete paralysis. Along with that, decapitations and bifurcations with slashing are just rarer than before, possibly because of the material change. Those ultra-sharp, ultra-strong weapons aren't around as much because of the material change.
And obviously, twisting embedded weapons endlessly is less effective. And that results in less "giving into pain" too. No more speardwarf beast killing just by getting a good stab in the stomach and twisting it, quickly sending the beast unconscious and then to death.