35 is the new 31 in terms of retirement, so what can be done with a build when done leveling has been made greater (though the meta still seems to be very armor stack oriented, even for high agi builds).
Updating will have be done manually, as Lord Yuang hints at- the launcher is borked currently. There are a few threads floating around about this with fixes and how-tos and such.
It's only non-strat characters can respec every seven days with no XP loss; strat chars can respec whenever but lose XP from doing so. Still, this is probably the most badass change I've noticed coming back. I now have like 5 STFs and it's rad, rad, rad.
The bonus from high level characters is now less significant than it once was due to the higher "final" levels present. Ironflesh (in addition to giving the HP bonus) affects how much prof you lose from armor weight now (more if, less loss; no if, full loss), not sure when that started but it's a nice thing to help balance it and STR in general against WM and AGI.