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[Catastrophic lolcats]

I've given 1.6.1 a rather big chance but some of the mechanics they've change are still utterly broken.

Rival system: While much more interesting than the old system it does have a lot of quirks. It's currently way too easy to get PP from taking land (which lasts for ages) making the system rather easy to game. The rival pool is far too small meaning you'll have to start declaring on allies or simply run out of people to beat up. Finally the limit to a single rival at the start of the game breaks a lot of the gameplay balance.
There might need to be a new system in place for truly great powers that forces them to play world police or something.

Vassal integration: it's both too fast and too pricy. Vassals can be integrated at a ridiculous rate meaning France and Denmark are powerhouses way before they should be. Vassals are now barely worth it unless you've completely abandoned both naval and colonial aspirations.
I much prefer the old method and wish they just slapped on a -1dip per month cost or something.

Westernisation: This is just ridiculous. You have to be so far behind in tech and since it scales up by size you can't be a decent empire. The added RR is also crippling and makes the whole game whack a mole for decades. Needs to be rebalanced to have governments, ideas (plutocracy, innovation), alliance with western powers and tolerance have an impact on westernisation speeds.
Westernising as Ragusa (why the hell is it eastern anyway?) was one of the most painful things I've gone through in EU4, I can't even imagine an Asian or African attempt. I heard NA natives have to be around 26 levels behind to start westernisation.
The major change is no longer getting Western units after westernising and due to the harshness of westernising makes it very debatable whether it is remotely worth it.

Colonisation: With the edition of some rather dubious policies that give you colonists and colonisation speed increases the major colonisers can get to some insane speeds. With trading companies you can suck trade from outside europe without even bothering with lightship commitment ( I had over 50% trade just from two South Indian trading ports).

Polices: Same ol' story with generic ideas being the illusion of choice. Some are completely useless, some not worth the MP cost while others are borderline overpowered. Most of the stronger ones seem to follow the better idea groups giving them covert buffs.

Trade: Inland trading nations suck way too much out of nodes. My Ragusa node despite having a ton of light ships patrolling and ALL trading buildings is losing 50% of it's trade to ... The Hansa and German minors.

France: The BBB is back with vengeance. She can now integrate all her provinces in barely a second. She can also make an alliance with Castile almost day 1 since she will only rival England (for some reason Castile and France are not historical enemies) and then they play the merry game of destory europe together. The combined forces of europe can't slow her down and she'll be chewing on the middle of the HRE by 1555.

EDIT:
Hordes: They're even worse than before. While there's been a decent attempt to balance pips across tech groups (could still be done better) hordes are still stuck with level 1 cav and infantry throughout the whole game, apparently they can't learn to use those pistols they keep raiding from the Russians.
For some unknown reason hordes now cannot form their conquest unions (Mughals, Qing) without REFORMING THEIR WHOLE GOVERNMENT FIRST. This completely castrates what were the only playable hordes in the game which were already under performing compared to their historical counterparts (also the opposite of what happened in history, the adaption of the local administration "reformed" them*). Whoever came up with this change needs an unpaid vacation asap.
Russia will also take the expansion idea first allowing them to roll all over Asia even faster than before. The nerf to trading goods outside of Europe makes Russia a little less powerful compared to Europe but puts Asia on even worse odds against the Russian bear. 

Culture converting: Can't convert culture if that province is not overseas (to the owner) and the nation of the primary culture still exists. This means as Granada if you steal some provinces off Castile or France you can't convert them to your culture unless those tags are completely wiped off the planet. All this does this buffs large nations and nerfs small nations (like the Netherlands).


*Although technically the Timurids were already semi-"reformed". Ruling from major cities and barely migrating.

[Sergarr]

And all this was not caught by the testing team... why?

[Catastrophic lolcats]

And all this was not caught by the testing team... why?

I believe that Paradox either has an extremely bad testing department or they disregard everything they say and choose to balance everything from their in-studio MP sessions. The latter is much more likely seeing some of Johan's replies about the patch. 

I really want to enjoy WoN since it adds so many fantastic things but the patch just changed so many underlying mechanics and broke so many that it's sucking almost all of the enjoyment from the game. A lot of these changes I don't exactly remember the community screaming to change either.

EDIT: The bug reporting team on the Paradox forum do seem to do a very fast and vigorous job, hats off to them. Seems there is a lack of that information being filtered back to the devs however.

[PanH]

Culture converting: Can't convert culture if that province is not overseas (to the owner) and the nation of the primary culture still exists. This means as Granada if you steal some provinces off Castile or France you can't convert them to your culture unless those tags are completely wiped off the planet. All this does this buffs large nations and nerfs small nations (like the Netherlands).

France isn't the worse, since it's just cosmopolitaine that you can't culture convert. Now, England can culture convert the holdings it has in France (normans and aquitaine) since they have no primary nation (ever, afaik, there's no TAG for it). Now, if you want to culture convert them back, invade the British Isles ! Totally makes sense !

[sebcool]

Since when have Paradox games ever been not broken in some way? This kind of stuff happens in nearly every one of their games, and it usually gets balanced out. France being OP is basically the standard for every EU game, it comes with being a huge nation among a bunch of tiny ones.

Vassal integration needs to be changed, though. It doesn't make much sense that it drains DP, which affects colonization speed and tech. It would make way more sense to use AP, since it affects coring and stability (IE, basically what integrating a vassal would involve). Doing that would also help slightly in nerfing France, since it would have to sacrifice it's stability and actually conquering instead of it's basically useless navy. Having it drain DP is also hugely annoying for Denmark, since it means delaying your colonization by several years, and you can't avoid it, since you need Norway to reach the new world in the first place.

[Lightning4]

Rival system: While much more interesting than the old system it does have a lot of quirks. It's currently way too easy to get PP from taking land (which lasts for ages) making the system rather easy to game. The rival pool is far too small meaning you'll have to start declaring on allies or simply run out of people to beat up. Finally the limit to a single rival at the start of the game breaks a lot of the gameplay balance.
There might need to be a new system in place for truly great powers that forces them to play world police or something.

I suspect (well, hope) it will be calibrated a little as time goes on. The rival pool is way, way too finicky, you can't even set some neighbors as a rival. As Morocco, I can only set Mali (an ally, for now, but an utter joke since they're sub-saharan) and Mamluks (probably the second most powerful nation in the world. Also an ally) as rivals.
Castile is no longer valid for some reason (even though they have ME as a rival), nor is Portugal (who is my friend in this MP game, though I had him as a rival for a little while). Nobody across the Mediterranean has shown up at any point.

There's probably some weird criteria here that hasn't been fully explored or posted on the wiki yet.

The mechanic as a whole doesn't seem to play too well for nations that aren't in the thick of things though.

Westernisation: This is just ridiculous. You have to be so far behind in tech and since it scales up by size you can't be a decent empire. The added RR is also crippling and makes the whole game whack a mole for decades. Needs to be rebalanced to have governments, ideas (plutocracy, innovation), alliance with western powers and tolerance have an impact on westernisation speeds.
Westernising as Ragusa (why the hell is it eastern anyway?) was one of the most painful things I've gone through in EU4, I can't even imagine an Asian or African attempt. I heard NA natives have to be around 26 levels behind to start westernisation.
The major change is no longer getting Western units after westernising and due to the harshness of westernising makes it very debatable whether it is remotely worth it.

The tech difference change does seem to really hurt Native Americans. I think it could be an unintended side effect of the Conquest of Paradise changes, which nerfed their tech group and forced them to finish their native ideas to remain 'competitive'. If westernization would factor this in, it'd be a little better, requiring them to be a net of 17 techs behind. That's around 6 in each group, which is easily possible to have by the time Europeans start really showing up in North America.

Not exactly sure what the change was intended to accomplish, besides stalling advancement of African and native nations.
It doesn't actually hurt anyone else that much, even for the Asians, they only need to be behind by an extra few techs.

France: The BBB is back with vengeance. She can now integrate all her provinces in barely a second. She can also make an alliance with Castile almost day 1 since she will only rival England (for some reason Castile and France are not historical enemies) and then they play the merry game of destory europe together. The combined forces of europe can't slow her down and she'll be chewing on the middle of the HRE by 1555.

I'm seeing this too in my MP game, Castile and France being buddies. I hope it breaks up sometime soon, because it makes for a ridiculous powerbase in Western Europe.
This is probably related to the weird rivalry system too, so maybe for some reason France can't set Castile as a rival, or vice versa.

[Stuebi]

So, does this stuff come even if I DONT own Wealth of Nations (the new dlc, might have gotten the name wrong)?

If yes, I might have not noticed it because I just started playing EU IV when it came on sale for -75% and thus basically skipped the "unbroken"-part of the game. It's a bit silly, I really enjoy the game while every vet I know tells me that the latest patch fucked it up big time.

Currently trying to unite Japan as a Daimyo, which isnt easy. On my third attempt and they keep uniting against me once I get to a certain size. :/ Granted, maybe I should be more patient and core and integrate the prvoicnes I conquer first, before moving on. Steamrolling my neighbors seems to have some serious backlashes.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Yes it was part of the 1.6 patch. If you really despise the changes then you can roll back to 1.5 using Steam but of course then you can't access ironman mode or multiplayer that way. I doubt Paradox will roll back any of the changes they made no matter the outcry from the community, I think some of the stuff can be fixed with major tweaks but historically Paradox has been slow at this. Expect a rather broken experience until a patch or two.

It's still a good game which makes me even more disappointed they added such wonky mechanics.

[Wysthric]

From my experience, Paradox games have a vastly shifting meta, which I find interesting although I can understand why people may not like this.

[MoLAoS]

From my experience, Paradox games have a vastly shifting meta, which I find interesting although I can understand why people may not like this.

CK2 had almost none of the balancing bullshit problems EU4 has.

[Sheb]

CK2 doesn't have balancing problems because the AI sucks so much all AI countries tends to explode after a while. Also, there is no check on player expansion.

[PanH]

Currently trying to unite Japan as a Daimyo, which isnt easy. On my third attempt and they keep uniting against me once I get to a certain size. :/ Granted, maybe I should be more patient and core and integrate the prvoicnes I conquer first, before moving on. Steamrolling my neighbors seems to have some serious backlashes.

Being a Daimyo is ridiculously hard now, since the Shogunate can integrate the rest of Japan in 20 years, while it took at least 10x (numbers of daimyos / 2) years and usually didn't happened before 1500 (when the Shogunate didn't simply got crushed).

[Sheb]

On the other hand, it used to be ridiculously easy.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Currently trying to unite Japan as a Daimyo, which isnt easy. On my third attempt and they keep uniting against me once I get to a certain size. :/ Granted, maybe I should be more patient and core and integrate the prvoicnes I conquer first, before moving on. Steamrolling my neighbors seems to have some serious backlashes.

Man, you're going to be disappointed ~200 years into your Japan game when Kirishan Tensions starts. Hint: Japan is not worth playing. At all. I thought it'd be fun too until the bullshit 'flavor' events that force you into revolt lock.

I even let the goddamn christian rebels break my country since 14 regiment groups poopped up with every Tension event that fired. Guess what? My religion didn't change. Rebels disappear, still shinto, still get Kirishin tensions every couple weeks. You can't change to Catholic to stop this, and you can't simply stay Shinto or the game ruins any fun you'll be trying to have about 1600.

When you get the choice to let westerners in, don't do it, ever. It ruins Japan's gameplay and shows us how Paradox is a Europe-fanboy without the ability to create real experiences in EU4 outside of painting a map a pretty color and watching your magic points tick up.

I *believe* picking a certain choice in the 'westerners arrive' or [whatever the event is called] will stop you from having a ruined Japan game.

[Sindain]

*snip*

*Japan stuff snip*

You don't have a choice on whether or not to let the westerners in, its just an event that happens. You can make the decision to enforce Sakoku which iirc takes 200 from each mp pool and requires a certain amount of stability, but it stops all that crap.