First impressions of 1.9
Skeletons have become ninja Legolas marksmen of doom. They can kite, they can intelligently avoid terrain that zombies will charge into, and they'll duck in and out behind trees and walls and things to snipe at you while avoiding return fire. Creepers can now instakill you when fully healed and wearing full iron armor. Zombie villager look scary now. Whoa! Skeleton horses everywhere! But apparently they're super nice and friendly. I have a pack that lives outside my base and we coexist peacefully. They frolic among the flowers by the lake and never bother me when I pass by. Somebody tamed a few and there's apparently a (breeding?) pair of them in spawn town on my server. Sometimes I like to think about me and the skeletal horses, hand in hoof, dancing under the stairs at night, going out drinking together, being best of friends. They're among the nicest and kindest creatures in minecraft this update.
Also, beetroots! The super exciting way to get...yet more red dye!
I suppose end cities are kind of neat if you can find one. So far the only one I've actually found was a single empty building. Pretty much gave up after that.
Shields? Sure, why not. But it's a bit of a nuisance that having a shield equipped slows down your movement when doing anything that involves right clicking. Feeding animals, planting seeds, etc. So i find myself swapping my shield off and on a lot.
Did you know that not only can beetroots make red dye, they can also be used to very inefficiently make soup? Because soup is a super important food source, right?
Oh, end stone can be crafted into bricks now. Sure, that's a thing it should be able to do. Although fully half the blocks in the entire game, have been waiting for an update for forever to allow them to be crafted into stairs and halfslabs and things. Why can I not have smoothstone stairs to match the smoothstone halfslabs rather than being stuck mixing them with stone brick? Why can I not have clay halfslabs? I'd really like to use those blocks, but I'm not going to leave everything spawnable, especially with all the nasty mob AI changes. Half-slabbing is a basic precaution, and I'm not going to skip it, so a lot of those blocks are pretty much unusable if you can't color coordinate them with something you can make halfslabs out of. But, hey! Endstone brick! Because everybody really wanted to use more endstone, right?
New boats...meh.
Mending sounds great. But I haven't seen it come up yet.
Have I mentioned beetroots? Go, go power beetroots! The mascot of 1.9.
TL;DR: Yes, there's some nice stuff. Sure, harder combat...that's nice if your motivation for playing online legos is for the combat experience. But overall this update seems a bit uninspired.