The changes remove some of the most memorable moments:

- Eating questionable meat for random powers

- Losing your great items permanently

- Not getting poison resistance and putting off the hive for ages

- Not being able to carry as much as a weak character

- Putting a stash on Hive:2 so monsters can't get your items

- Being a mummy summoner and having a full screen of summons (no hunger requirement)

- Hill orc priests would wander the map gaining converts

A lot of these things became part of the game muscle memory to avoid. They were hilarious and emotional as a new player. They are now obsolete. I have mixed feelings - I always felt enough mitigation existed in the game and I enjoyed learning about it

Hive was a cute thing but I absolutely do not miss item destruction and weight management lol

Item destruction I found okay because randarts were immune and it made them feel special. They could have went down the route of mitigation but I respect their clean design ethos

Weight management - yes, hard to have too much nostalgia for that one

I really miss being able to play a SpEn backstabber. It was the highlight of my DCSS experience. Such a fun, if slightly overpowered, combo. Then they took invisibility out of the enhancer starting book.

I started replaying DCSS last week after a hiatus of about two years, SpEn is one of my go-to backgrounds and it's still quite fun IMO. You can worship Dithmenos to get increased stealth. It's not as OP as invisibility but it's still quite fun once you get your stealth to a high level.

It's still viable even without invisibility. Petrify, Ensorcelled Hibernation, Uskayaw and Dithmenos are still there.

My last win was an Spriggan Venom Mage that could backstab poison resistant enemies with a +11 artefact dagger.

The blog has a list of all recent trunk and released changes: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog

As I mentioned in the sibling comment, there's a vocal minority in this game loudly complaining about any change. My suggestion is to decide for yourself, play an older version if you prefer, or any of the dozen forks, all available on most public servers.

Off the top of my head, they have recently:

* removed the whole hunger/food system: no need to eat, no need to butcher corpses or collect food, magic doesn't make you hungry.

* removed cursed items: an issue only in the early game, trivially managed by careful identification of unknown scrolls

* removed unremarkable species or monsters

* removed trivial spells such as Deflect Missiles or Regeneration

I haven't played rogue/hack/nethack games in a couple of decades, so I'm out of it. But: no need to eat? That was a key part of the game (though the cannibalistic part of that was sometimes weird). Cursed items, on the other hand, were a PITA so I wouldn't miss that part.

About hunger management: it was annoying, it didn't bring any strategical or interesting gameplay, and if you were unlucky with RNG you'd just die. One or more inventory slots had to be used for food. It would heavily penalise newbies or cautious players that were taking the game a little slower than most. Would force you to cast lower level, less fun, spells so that you'd not starve because you cast one too many level 9 spell.

That doesn't sound fun to me, and don't miss it for one second.

I haven't played in a few years but always felt like crawl's hunger system drove faster games -- where in NetHack I could usually find a way to survive indefinitely and camp out and explore slowly, crawl always felt like the Star Wars garbage compactor pushing me forward.

I think I liked it but I'm not sure it helped me master the gameplay (I sometimes felt rushed even when hunger management wasn't obviously an issue).

Food is far more important in nethack than it ever was in DCSS, it was never a key part of the game in DCSS, just an annoying (and sometimes spoilery) minigame.

They replaced food clock with a straight-up death clock. There's a counter that constantly ticks down; if it reaches zero, you just die.

Just to be clear, the death clock is hidden and is intended to be impossible to trigger if you're not actively cheesing with one of the very few exploits that depend on waiting for a very long time. IIRC to tune the clock, they took the longest non-exploit game on record, and doubled the time that took.

While I like many of the changes in DCSS, I have stayed on 0.24 because I'm wary of how the game will play without food. I kind of enjoy struggling through the early-ish game without using permafood, and then seeing a pack of orcs and going "Hey they look tasty, maybe I can eat some of them before I starve to death!"

That being said I want to play Djinn eventually so I'll upgrade when that time comes.