I haven't gotten that far yet into the new update, but the balance is so rough I feel the need to comment already.
The problems:
- 80-90% of missions drop no equipment at all, let alone useful items. This makes the game feel empty and unrewarding, as well as making it hard to gear your characters.
- Missions are HARD. The level indicators do not seem to match the level of difficulty at all. I'm assuming this is because they are balanced around having an equipped 5-man party, but you don't start with that.
- The above two problems lead to my characters being overleveled and yet not being able to progress.
- I'm permanently out of food. After a long time I finally had enough scraps to unlock the hunting thing, but it seems useless as it not only takes up a party member, but resting doesn't recover them, so it actually takes up two. Even now, significantly later, I still don't have 7 people right now, so I still can't really use it.
- The boss difficulty indicator seems completely off. I only fought the first level 1 boss and it wrecked me until I got a 5-man party that was level 3-5.