Agreed. Even Conan players that are primarily PVE like myself (and online personalities like Wak and Kiah) immediately notice these arbitrary and mostly bad changes. The latest patch was probably the worst, but I’ve been playing for 2+ years and I’ve seen what you refer to.
Funcom was taken over by a Chinese company that is solely interested in milking the existing player base for cash. So the developers working on the game now are strictly B-team (maybe C?) and really don’t know WTF they are doing.
The texture and model memory footprint of the game has ballooned so badly over the last year that the game is now unplayable without 64 GB of main memory (I used to easily play at full quality in 16). Just lazy / bad developers IMHO.