Oh man, now that I've worked them out, I'm really liking a lot of the more recent changes.
Skill tickets + capped plat costs make it feasible to get every skill you want fairly quickly. Good shit.
The new god, Yacatect of Wealth, is amazing (and also contributes to the last point). She takes rings/amulets as offerings so she's dead easy to level. Her skill bonuses are to Negotiation, Sense Quality, Traveling, Investing, and Alchemy (which in E+ can be used to make near-weightless food & pots of cure mutation and water, and a chunk of the items for artifact fusion atop other stuff). Her pet turns food into plat coins at a rate of 2 per sleep. Her gem gives 10-25 plat coins per month. Her weapon is a near-weightless throwing coin that gives invisible sight, darkness res +200, and bonuses to investing + negotiation. Her hidden item massively reduces negotiation (-3173), which drastically reduces how much gold you have to spend to trigger progress in negotiation.
That's important because of how they changed materials scrolls. Now Inferior/Change/Superior each have a list of materials which they cycle through, same way every time.
Listed on the wiki. That gives you a couple options and even further increases the value of investing in magic shops. You can use blessed change material to cycle up to one of the stopping points (Dragon Scale or Adamatium depending on where you want the item to go), then use a maximum of four blessed superior material to take it to crystal/titanium/mithril or emerald/diamond/rubynus/ether. If you want dawn or spirit cloth, you can hit it with inferior material to turn it into paper and then 1-2 superior to get the cloth you favor.
It's hard to overstate how massive it is to be able to remove that particular RNG goldsink. Especially when I play mostly Claymore. Knowing
exactly how much I need to spend to get all my armor to Griffon Scale (and later Spirit Cloth), and it being "not too much" is wonderful.
e: Well what the fuck. My little girl
had an artifact crystal battleaxe but it up and disappeared at some point.