A lot of the problems I complained about earlier were fixed, so I'm happy about that. I've also gotten the chance to play quite a bit more now, so I have more to say.
Paleontology - fun, quick skill to max. Literally told by the skill trainer it's pointless, and it is indeed pointless, but kinda cool to summon skeleton dinosaurs all the same. It's the perfect example of Project Gorgon humour and I'm very glad it was a short skill. I think if this had been long it would have been terrible, but as is, it's great.
Whittling - another pretty quick, easy skill to max. Comes with buffs to knife fighting and minor buffs to deer, rabbit and pig. I'm not against any of that and I'm glad you let us use oak wood all the way to max level. If we had to start using spruce etc. I would probably start complaining, but again I think you've done a good job. I'm a bit confused about why it takes artistry levels to appreciate the carvings, when you can make statues with blacksmithing and jack 'o' lanterns with artistry which give larger buffs and don't have these requirements to appreciate, but oh well, not a big deal.
Animal Husbandry - so I said I thought it seemed interesting earlier, well to be honest, now I don't think it actually is that interesting. You just breed the animals together then pick the ones with the highest stats and repeat for a long time. It feels like it's not even worth leveling up any of the pets until you get a really high stat one so I'm also a bit conflicted there. I don't really use animal handling much so I'll probably just breed animals on the backburner and eventually max the skill. In terms of just leveling the skill, it's faster to fail the breeding since you get 50xp after waiting a few hours, compared to 100xp for waiting a few days when you succeed, which doesn't make any sense. It makes all the items you can craft to increase the breeding chance pointless and is completely counter intuitive. Maybe genetics makes this more interesting? I wouldn't know because I haven't managed to unlock it yet but I guess it could be cool making a really funky looking pet.
Armorsmithing - waiting until poetry jam buffs to really do this properly but I've scratched the surface and it seems ok. I won't be making new armour pieces for my tank set because I don't see an extra few % of mitigation as worth the cost, but I'm sure others might. Leveling it is maybe a bit too grindy at the higher levels? I've only planned it out, but even with nearly all the exp buffs in the game and a stack and a half of magic sand to do motherlode surveys with, I still don't have quite enough slabs yet. For reference, that magic sand probably took me over a year to accumulate and doing the normal surveys is painfully slow. I think this would be a tough one for new(er) players to max.
So may as well talk about the new survey system in Povus, I did 50 astounding metal slab surveys and I think I profited around 110-115 astounding slabs (I mined a few non-surveyed metal nodes on the way) and it took me about an hour and a half. The constantly spawning ratkin are kind of annoying and a few times I had 8 ratkin miners spawn on me when I was trying to mine the node. I think the number that spawn needs to be decreased a bit, I don't think it should ever be more than 5 and maybe 2-3 on average. I also don't think it's necessary to have the chance to fail at mining the node, normal mining surveys were not particularly op so I don't see why these limitations have to be brought into place alongside constantly spawning mobs on you. I think this is just way too slow, motherlodes are easily 10x faster and when there's that much of a difference between methods, it makes it really hard to justify doing the slower one. Also just want to say that the compass directions are backwards in Povus, reported it in game but I found it a bit irritating.
I want to talk about the Povus invasion again. I think it's a lot better than when I first reviewed it, the enemies don't stick around as long after the wave is done and a lot of the annoying bugs are fixed. I still think it's too hard, the mobs themselves aren't too difficult, until you get to the flapskull wave and then you better hope you have an absolute minimum of 10 people, since they completely swarm you with large shout radius and quick movement. But the problem is that no small group of players is ever going to be able to clear the mobs quickly enough. Even with close to 30 players doing it today, we only just managed to almost finish the fae wave and still we ran out of time. I think to be able to clear the whole thing in time, is roughly equivalent to a 40 man raid right now. I don't necessarily mind large raids/world bosses/events, the problem is getting that many people together, and in a relatively low population niche game like this it's just not really achievable.
The xogrite rewards also feel a bit lackluster. I didn't mention this before, but I think the rate of xogrite in general is fine. I'm still not a fan of time-gated currencies like this but I understand why it was done. The problem I have with it, is how you get it, if you do a full invasion for an hour, even with a large group you're maybe getting 7 xogrite in that hour. If it's a small group you could be looking at even just 2-4. Yet there's an hourly crafting quest from Lincha which averages ~11 xogrite for something you can do in 10 seconds. Similar story for the barter with the dwarf smith, forgot her name. I don't think these need nerfing, but I think the amount from the invasion is too low and could use a buff. Otherwise, the current method for xogrite feels like holistic wellness where you just log in for a minute every hour, do the quest then logout again.
I briefly tested the shield changes with my unarmed/shield tank and I don't think the 10% nerf to bulwark mode broke the game or anything. I haven't done a full run yet and no idea if it's completely screwed over players who don't have access to perfectly rolled best in slot gear.
Dumdidum is right, most of the people giving feedback have played this game for years and have incredibly good gear, money, resources etc. I would like to see some more newer players adding their feedback.
Still, really enjoying the update and happy about how fast a lot of the bugs have been fixed.