I barely started on it yesterday. Had been neglecting KoL for other things, like PS2 game binging(Ar tonelico II and Shadow of the Colossus, to be precise), so I wound up just dropping my then-current ascension and starting anew. (It was a Boris run, so it's not like it'll take too long to do another one, even at my crap pace.)
Anyway, from what I've read and from my first day it seems sort of interesting, and i'm glad the tower's gone, but having to do all the quests AND the entire ship is leaving a sort of bad taste in my mouth. If they've got that big ol' ship there, why couldn't they just say "Do the main quests enough to unlock the areas to get the bugbears to fight, then just clean out the ship"? I knew they said the new path would make ascension take longer, but this feels almost artificial to me. *shrug* Might just be me though.